Time Sense
by clerical medical
Summary: What do you do when you find yourself stuck in Cardiff with a blinding headache, and a man in a long brown overcoat suddenly becomes inexplicably fascinating?
1. Chapter 1

The Doctor was adamant that he wasn't brooding. But he deliberately didn't glance around the console room, keeping his eyes fixed downwards in pretended concentration as he flicked switches and tapped buttons to materialise the TARDIS. He didn't like looking around his ship – his home - and seeing nobody there. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to share with him the wonders of the universe. Nobody to show off to – that's what Martha would have said, and Donna, too, for that matter. Anyway, it was time for a refuel, and that meant a trip to Cardiff so that the TARDIS could soak up some of that rift energy that she kept telling him she liked so much. Actually there were other rifts they could go to, but Cardiff wasn't so bad these days. There was always Jack, and now he'd got used to the sheer wrongness of the man being a fixed point in time, he was quite good company. Perhaps it would be a good thing to catch up.

The wheezing, grinding noise of the TARDIS' materialisation process stilled, and the Doctor pulled on his long brown coat and steeled himself against what he knew would be a bracing Welsh breeze. The Plass was always windy. Just as he opened the door, all the hair on the back of his neck suddenly stood up, and he peered round the side of the TARDIS just in time to see something rather odd. Thinking that Jack could wait another few minutes for the big reunion, he found himself to be sufficiently intrigued to follow.

One hour earlier...

Alice Milton was adamant that she wasn't going to start being someone who sighed. In fact, she had always found other people sighing rather irritating. But she was starting to understand why they did it. Sitting at the little desk in her attic room she looked out over the Cardiff rooftops towards the Bay, and massaged her temples, and silently vowed not to start sighing.

Three months ago she had been looking forward to moving to a new job, new flat, new people, new challenges, and planning a wedding, and it had all fallen apart. Ed had broken the engagement off and moved back to New Zealand, and the funding for her community worker job in Manchester had fallen through. She had had to move out of Ed's flat at the same time as he did so that he could sell it, and she was absolutely not going to go back to living at her parents' house. She did still have some dignity after all, though it was being eroded by the day.

Sharing all these woes on facebook had at least got her a roof over her head – the attic room belonged to an old college friend, Jenny, who had, for reasons that Alice couldn't quite fathom, set up a florist shop between Cardiff city centre and the Bay, and had offered Alice a room in return for helping out with delivering flowers. It was marginally better than nothing, and Alice felt slightly guilty about not being more grateful, but it was hard to summon up much in the way of optimism. No home of her own, no proper job, and ever since she'd moved to Cardiff she'd been plagued by such awful headaches so that she was only barely earning her keep at all.

The GP had (quite reasonably) diagnosed their cause as 'stress', which had really wound Alice up. She didn't do stress. She grudgingly acknowledged that the last three months might have been a bit challenging, but stress was all about how you dealt with life, wasn't it? Or rather how you failed to deal with it. Having stress headaches was a sign of failure in Alice's book, and she didn't want to be sitting around popping ibuprofen when she could be out doing something (anything really) or even out looking for a proper job, so that she could pay Jenny some rent (or let's face it, get a place of her own, ideally several hundred miles from Cardiff).

The GP's advice to down tools the moment she felt one of the headaches coming on was a bit of a joke. The only times at the moment when Alice didn't feel there was a headache coming on was when it had already arrived and was in full swing. There had been a couple of times when it had got so bad that she'd momentarily lost her sense of which was up and had embarrassingly lurched, gasping and gulping in air, into the nearest wall. People probably thought she'd been drunk, Alice thought, bleakly.

So she had soldiered on, despite feeling terrible most of the time, just to be getting out and doing things. She closed her eyes and let her mind wander, thinking back a day to some flowers she'd delivered to a small terraced house on Bute Street, only about 10 minutes' walk from Jenny's place. The woman who'd answered the door had been in a terrible state – the door had been flung back with enthusiasm, but the woman's face had fallen when she'd seen Alice and the flowers – in fact, she'd started sobbing so suddenly and so uncontrollably, that Alice had ended up being drawn into the house and spending the best part of an hour making tea and listening to the woman's tale of her 20-year old daughter Megan's disappearance. The girl been gone a week, completely out of character, and Alice winced as she remembered Brenda saying that Megan and Alice looked rather alike – apparently she'd seen Alice through the frosted glass front door and for a moment had thought that her daughter had come home, only to have the hopes dashed when she answered the door.

Such was Alice's guilt at this piece of mistaken identity that she had ended up leaving Brenda her mobile number, in case she needed someone to talk to again. She didn't have any other family, and had seemed very grateful. Alice left, and almost straight away had to duck into an alleyway and throw up. The headache that had been bad before had risen to such intolerable intensity in Brenda's house that Alice could hardly believe that she'd managed to keep listening. Or maybe that was the key – get a reputation as a good listener by being in so much pain that you're unable to form a coherent sentence.

Back in the little attic bedroom, Alice's mobile rang, and she saw that it was Brenda calling. 'Brenda, is that you? Has there been any news?'

'Alice – no, there's nothing, but... could you come round? I just can't cope with being alone today. It's Megan's birthday...' Brenda's voice cracked.

'Give me ten minutes' replied Alice, quickly, glad of something positive that she could do.

Alice's headache remained unchanged even with the fresh air of the five minute walk to Brenda's house. Wasn't fresh air supposed to help? For early June it was mild but not warm – though to Alice the air felt close as if a thunderstorm was coming. Perhaps if it did she would finally get rid of the bloody headaches. Or maybe she was allergic to flowers, or to Brenda. Or to bloody Cardiff. Alice paused for a deep breath and rang the bell.


	2. Chapter 2

When Brenda answered the door a moment later Alice saw immediately that her eyes were red and puffy, and she had a mangled tissue in one hand.

'Come in dear. I'm sorry for all this. I feel bad dragging you here.'

'Nonsense,' replied Alice briskly, her would-be community worker's instincts taking over. 'It's good to see you, and you shouldn't be alone today of all days.'

Alice followed Brenda into the kitchen and immediately grimaced as her headache got even worse. She even fancied that she could see double – for a moment a chair at the breakfast table looked strangely blurred, she blinked again, and everything looked normal. Fortunately Brenda was putting the kettle on and hadn't noticed anything, but it made Alice decide something.

'Brenda, how long is it since you left the house?'

'I haven't,' the older woman admitted, 'Not since she... since last week.'

'OK. You've got a mobile, haven't you?' Alice asked, and Brenda nodded. 'And Megan knows the number?' Another nod. 'And the police have it too?'

'Yes, of course.'

'Then switch the kettle off and get your coat. I'm taking you out for coffee.' Alice felt slightly bad that her main motivation was to get out of the house (the headache was actually starting to make her feel nauseous again), but it was also a good idea for Brenda to get some fresh air. After some persuading, the older woman agreed, and the two of them set off for the Plass – only a few minutes' walk away.

There was a stiff breeze blowing across Roald Dahl Plass, Cardiff's redeveloped main square in the Bay. Alice hunched her shoulders as she and Brenda walked quickly across the open space. Leaving Brenda's house hadn't brought the usual relief to Alice's headache, which continued to pulse seemingly right in the centre of her skull. She didn't even register where she was exactly when a particularly strong wave of dizziness hit her – staggering, she might even have fallen if she hadn't managed to get a hand out and steady herself on what turned out to be a rather odd looking blue telephone box. As she touched it, a strange sensation shot up her arm – like an electric shock, but the feeling disappeared quickly once she'd pushed herself away from it, and she was able to persuade Brenda that she'd just gone over on her ankle.

The cafe on the far side of the Plass was reasonably empty. They took a table by the window, and as she sat down Alice couldn't stop herself massaging her temples. The headache was as strong as it had ever been, if not more so, and was leaving little room for coherent thought, let alone caring for someone else in their hour of need. Alice was beginning to realise that she should have found someone else to sit with Brenda today. She really did feel extremely unwell, now. Various things kept going in and out of focus – the chair, then the menu card on the table were blurred for a moment and then went back to normal. This time Brenda did notice.

'Oh Alice, you poor thing. You look white as a sheet. I'll go and get us both a hot chocolate – you stay here.'

Brenda headed for the counter, looking happier for having someone to look after, while Alice didn't even try to protest, subsiding into silent gratitude, and wishing that whatever mother of all thunderstorms was coming would hurry up and arrive so she could go back to being able to think straight and get through a day without almost overdosing on painkillers.

Brenda was still at the counter when something made Alice whip round to face the door. There hadn't been a particular noise, and nobody else in the cafe seemed startled, but for some reason she had shivered, almost tingled all over. The man in the long brown overcoat who had just come through the door looked ordinary enough, and while couldn't put her finger on what it was that was so striking about him, rather to her embarrassment she realised that she'd half got to her feet and backed against the window as he went past.

He gave her an odd look, and sat down at the next table.

'Sorry,' Alice mumbled, and groped her way back to her seat.

The headache was the same as it had been, but was now joined by something else – a background buzzing, tingling, rather like the wash of an adrenalin rush, that had started the moment the brown coated man had walked into the cafe. It was a strong enough sensation to have her flexing her fingers as if trying to get rid of pins and needles. And she still couldn't seem to drag her eyes off the stranger, who now looked intrigued.

Alice forced herself to look down at the menu card (thankfully no longer blurred) and with her peripheral vision saw the man get out what looked like an overlarge mobile phone, or perhaps a calculator, but with a surprising number of flashing lights in various colours. The man was surreptitiously moving it about, as if searching for a signal – perhaps it was just a rather odd phone. As he pointed it at Alice's table, he flicked it with his finger, and shook it a couple of times, before glancing up and down, but he didn't try and make a call – rather he sat back against the window, and tapped the device thoughtfully against his cheek a few times, before getting up and joining the queue at the counter, just as Barbara returned with two steaming cups of hot chocolate.

'Thank you' Alice smiled.

The two women drank and talked while Alice struggled to focus on the conversation against the competing demands of the neverending pain in her head and her unwilling fascination with the man in the brown coat (who was now drinking tea and looking at them through rather geeky dark-framed glasses). The buzzing sensation had faded slightly for a minute – while the man had been at the counter - but was now back full force, and Alice briefly wondered whether she was also allergic to strange and vaguely attractive men in trench coats, before wrenching her mind back to Brenda.

'Tell me more about Megan,' Alice started. 'I can see that the two of you are really close.' She kept everything carefully in the present tense.

'She's the best. She's been my lifeline, and I've been so lucky to have her still living at home with me. I'd have been lost without her, after my Bill died last year... well, I'm lost without her now, aren't I?' The tears returned full force.

'She'd never just leave like that,' Brenda said, staring unseeing out of the window while the tears poured down her face. 'Something must have happened to her. What if she never comes home? What it I never see my little girl again?'

Even as Alice murmured pointless words of comfort, she could see out of the corner of her eye the brown coat man looking at them again over the rim of his tea mug. He was now looking decidedly calculating.

As Alice drained the last of her hot chocolate, Brenda placed her hand on hers, and squeezed her fingers. 'Thanks for listening,' she said.

'I'm sorry there's nothing I can do,' replied Alice, with genuine regret. You know where to find me – and really, don't hesitate to call me any time, if it helps to talk.'

'Thanks,' replied Brenda, as they both stood up. 'But you look terrible, dear. Whatever these headaches are they're obviously knocking you for six. Don't worry about me – get yourself back to Jenny's place and rest.'

'I think I will – I'll get a bit more fresh air, then head back and lie in a darkened room,' acknowledged Alice, with a weary smile. 'Phone me, though, if there's any news, or if there's anything you need, or if you just want a coffee and a chat?'

'I will,' Brenda smiled, sadly, and Alice watched from the Cafe door as Brenda headed back across the Plass, and then wandered slowly after her, heading for one of the benches. Oddly, the headache had lifted marginally for a while after Brenda had gone, but as Alice reached the middle of the Plass again, and that strange blue phone box, she suddenly felt very odd indeed – everything felt distant, except the pain in her head, the tingling all over her body, and a rushing, buzzing noise in her ears. All at once she no longer knew which way was up, and only realised she'd started to fall when she felt someone grasp her shoulders to steady her, the touch of their hands feeling so much like an electric shock that she thought she might actually have cried out.


	3. Chapter 3

A moment later Alice was sitting on the curb just by the fountain and her vision was clearing slightly, but she didn't need to open her eyes to know that the person who had caught her, and who was now sitting next to her, was the man from the cafe. He had his hand on her back, as he had been encouraging her to keep her head down while the dizziness passed, and the touch was electric, making her feel giddy. Sitting straighter, with some effort, she looked into his face and immediately lurched backwards, unable to look away from his large brown eyes.

Alice didn't often swear, but she couldn't stop herself from blurting out, in a slightly slurred voice, 'Sorry, but who the bloody hell are you?'

'I'm the Doctor,' he replied carefully, not taking his eyes off her.

'And I know where Megan is-'

'What?' Alice interrupted. 'If you've done something to her... Where is she?'

To her frustration it came out no more than a whisper.

'No, no, I've done nothing to her. She's fine, really fine,' the man insisted. 'Well, I think she's probably fine... she'll probably be fine once I've worked out how to reverse it,' he continued, scratching the back of his head and averting his eyes.

'What are you talking about? Where is she?' Alice asked, agitated, but finding herself frustratingly unable to stand, or even raise her voice to the shout that she was aiming for, through the pain in her head and the incessant tingling, buzzing sensation everywhere else.

'I imagine she's home by now,' said the man who called himself the Doctor. 'She was in the cafe with you, of course, but she's not here now. She'll have followed her mother home... she wouldn't know what else to do, poor thing.'

Alice stared. 'You're mad. None of that made any sense.' She wished she felt confident that if she stood up and walked off she wouldn't just fall over again.

The Doctor looked down at his hands for a moment. 'I can get Megan back,' he said, and looked up, with genuine concern in his eyes. 'But at the moment it's you I'm more worried about. Let's see: headaches like you've never known before,' - he started counting off Alice's symptoms on his fingers – 'and as you passed my TARDIS there you almost keeled over...'

Alice interrupted, nodding. 'I never said – thanks for catching me. Wait a minute – your what?'

The Doctor waved it off. 'I expect you've been getting some echoes, as well,' he went on.

'Echoes?'

At Alice's blank look he clarified, 'Double images, blurred vision, just on particular objects, yes?'

Alice nodded again. 'But how do you know all that?' She asked. 'Who are you anyway?'

'I told you, I'm the Doctor – and that's the answer to both questions, by the way.' He grinned, standing up and brushing the dust off the seat of his coat.

'Anyway, I can help you,' he said, offering Alice a hand. She grasped it, once again feeling an almost painful jolt of something pass through her as she stood shakily, and grabbed the man's arm with both hands.

'That's right, hold onto me,' he said, easily, 'because this is going to get worse before it gets better.' He took out an ordinary-looking phone (not the strange device from the cafe) and speed dialled a number, while manoeuvring Alice towards the middle of the platform around the fountain, closer to the strange blue box which the even stranger man had called his TARDIS.

With the phone cradled between his shoulder and his ear, Alice dimly heard him say, 'Yes, it's me... I'm coming down, and I've got a friend with me – could you make yourself scarce for a few minutes, she's not going to like you...' As the Doctor closed the phone with a snap, the pain in Alice's head intensified so suddenly that she staggered and actually moaned out loud, losing her grip on the Doctor's arm, and he lowered her gently to sit back on the kerb and left his hands firmly grasping her shoulders, his touch keeping her upright even as it disorientated her even further.

'Look at me, Alice,' he said, urgently, and she tried to focus on his face. 'Trust me, this is going to be easier if you sleep through it.'

Alice felt cool fingers against her temple, and then all she could see was a pair of very large brown eyes, and then there was nothing at all.

The pain returned first, and she spent a few moments working out that she wasn't actually moving - she was lying on something (something fairly soft and comfortable, it turned out) and it just felt like everything was moving because the throbbing pain in her head was making her feel seasick. She opened her eyes cautiously, and found that she was lying on a battered old sofa, in what looked like a cross between an underground station and a mad professor's laboratory. There didn't appear to be any windows.

'Welcome back, Alice, and welcome to Torchwood,' said a new voice.

Alice valiantly struggled to push herself upright, but a gentle hand pushed her down again, and she turned her head to see a dark haired woman who looked about her own age, perching next to her and smiling in a slightly strained way.

'I'm Gwen Cooper,' she said. 'And this is Ianto Jones.' She nodded to the side and Alice saw a man in a grey suit leaning, arms folded, against the doorframe. The Doctor was sitting opposite her, looking intently at her. He had put his geeky glasses back on.

'Actually, where am I?' she managed. 'What is this place?' She was trying hard to keep the panic out of her voice.

'We can get to most of that later,' replied the Doctor. 'For now, I need you to trust me. As I've just explained to these two – and to Jack, who's been sent to his office, because if you reacted strongly to me, there's no telling what meeting him would do to you.' The Doctor shuddered slightly. 'I know what's wrong with you, and it's not going to get any better, it's going to get worse, unless you let me fix it for you.'

Before Alice could get any of the half dozen questions in her mind formed into sentences, the Doctor was talking again. 'You are timesick,' he said, simply.

'Timesick,' Alice repeated. This day had already gone off the scale in terms of strangeness, but she didn't really have the energy to question anything any more.

The Doctor pushed his geeky glasses further up his nose with an index finger. 'You are sensitive to distortions and anomalies in time,' he went on, gesticulating wildly as if to draw the distortions and anomalies in the air, 'which is highly unusual in a human being, if not unique.' He looked vaguely impressed by this.

'There are a few species out there that are time sensitive, but it is simply part of our natural genetic make-up, we're meant to be that way, and our brains are wired for it. Yours isn't. While you were unconscious I had a little look in your head (don't worry, I didn't pry into anything private), and for some reason – some genetic fluke – you were born with a partially functioning extra lobe in your brain that is sensitive to time.

'So you're able to pick up distortions and anomalies, but you don't have the bit that would interpret them for you. With nowhere for all that information to go, the normal human part of your brain has been interpreting all those signals as pain. A bit like the referred pain that you might get from an amputated limb, I suppose. But just a lot more complicated. Your headaches started when you moved to Cardiff because Cardiff happens to be built on a gigantic rift in time and space. Just about the worst place for a partly time sensitive person to end up, in fact.'

Alice simply stared at him, aware that he was talking nonsense, but that she wasn't in any state to argue. And she wouldn't know where to start, anyway. She was lying on a tatty sofa in what looked like some kind of secret base, all this talk about time sensitivity was just too far-fetched and strange.

The Doctor was talking again. 'If you will let me, I'll get inside your head and try and do some rewiring for you. Until I get in there again and try a few things out, I'm not sure what I'll be able to do, and it might not be a pleasant experience, but I can tell you now that there isn't really anyone else who can help you, and as long as you stay here, things will keep getting worse until, well, it won't come to that, will it, because I'm here,' he finished, quickly, looking down at his now-clasped hands.

Alice nodded, then wished she hadn't, as another wave of nausea rose and subsided. 'At this point I'm willing to try just about anything.' She had truthfully never felt more unwell, and the idea of it just getting worse and worse... even if this man was a nutcase, he surely couldn't make it worse than it already was.

The Doctor came and knelt beside her. Very gently he tilted her face towards him and again she felt cool fingers, this time touching both temples, and the last thing she saw before everything in the physical world faded to nothing was the Doctor closing his own eyes in concentration.

But this time, she did not sleep.

Instead, into the comforting and familiar nothingness where she found herself there was a soundless voice, speaking to her.

'Hello Alice, don't fight me, just relax and let me in.'

She knew it was the Doctor, and tried to do as he said, but she didn't know how, and her mental image of him flickered and faded as she grew more and more frustrated.

'You're trying too hard,' the silent voice said, as if from a distance, and it sounded strained.

'Just relax. Trust me. Think about something peaceful, and forget I'm even here.'

Alice tried again, focusing on the idea of breathing, in, out, in out, trying to still her mind and let go of the strain and stress of the last few weeks, and wanting desperately to be able to trust this stranger enough to let him help.

'That's it. Relax.' The voice was closer again, and sounding more relieved.

Then, without any warning, it was as if the ground beneath her feet had shifted and settled, and she knew that she was no longer alone in her own head. She tried to quell her instinctive panic at the idea of such an intimate invasion, but it was the Doctor's mind which soothed her own, taking control of her flailing thoughts as if he were taming a startled wild animal. His presence inside her head was like ice and fire, but in a moment of clarity she realised that for some reason she trusted this strangest of all strangers.

Alice felt the last shreds of control unravel, her thoughts became disjointed, and the Doctor's presence flowed through her mind, stroking, healing, soothing, and reshaping. It wasn't long before she lost the ability to follow what was happening, and gradually felt herself slip gently away into the comforting dark.


	4. Chapter 4

When Alice was next aware of anything, it was that for the first time in a long time she was pain free, though she did feel distinctly odd. She was still lying down, and there was something warm pressing lightly to the side of her neck. She opened her eyes a crack, and saw Gwen, the dark-haired young woman from before, perched beside her. It had been Gwen's fingers on Alice's neck, monitoring her pulse, but when she saw that Alice was waking up she'd quickly drawn them back, and smiled at her instead.

The third thing she noticed was that the Doctor was sprawled on the sofa opposite her, his long brown coat (along with one of his arms) spilling onto the floor, and he was out cold – he seemed to be having his pulse checked by-

Alice flinched, and scrambled to sit upright. The man with the Doctor was... she didn't know what he was, but he wasn't like anyone she'd ever seen. He looked normal but there was something very strange indeed about him, disconcerting, shocking even. He just felt wrong, Alice admitted to herself, even as she quelled the judgement. She was not generally a person who judged people on first appearance, but still...

The man turned to face her (to her embarrassment she realised that she must have gasped out loud when she'd seen him), the most charming smile on his rather handsome features. Alice was aware of how she must look – as if she wanted to cross the street to avoid him – but he seemed not to be all that surprised.

'Alice, this is Captain Jack Harkness,' said Gwen. 'Head of Torchwood 3. He wasn't around earlier because, actually, the Doctor thought meeting him might kill you, to be honest.'

Alice glanced sidelong at her. She sounded utterly sincere.

'And it probably would have done,' confirmed Jack, his easy manner, which Alice thought may be a practiced act, belying the seriousness of his own words. 'The Doctor will probably explain why later,' he went on, as if it was something that he himself wasn't keen to talk about. 'In fact, he's on his way back now.'

Jack scooted to the end of the sofa to give the Doctor some room – he had just started to stir and was raising a hand to his own head, wincing.

Alice felt a pang of worry, and of guilt. 'Is he OK? What he did to me – did that knock him out?'

Jack nodded. 'And I'll tell you, it takes quite a bit to take out this guy.' He offered his hand to the Doctor, who sat up gingerly and rotated his head a few times, realigning the joints in his neck and shoulders with an audible series of clicks. At the same moment, the grey suited man – Ianto - came in carrying a tray containing what turned out to be cups of tea for her and for the Doctor and coffee for the others.

'Alice – good to see you awake and alert.' The Doctor said, sincerely, a genuine and warm smile on his face. He took a large gulp of tea, savouring it for a moment, and then shaking off his own fatigue, he put the cup down, sprang up off the sofa, fished something metallic out of his jacket pocket, and bounded over the kneel in front of where Alice was sitting.

'Hold still a minute, I just want to check something,' he said, and with a buzzing noise and a blue light, he waved the instrument he was holding several times across Alice's forehead, and then beamed in obvious satisfaction.

'Well, Doctor,' came Jack's drawl, 'what did you manage to do?'

'I had hoped to be able to just sever the connections – effectively switching off the rogue lobe,' he explained, turning back to Alice apologetically. 'After all, it shouldn't really have been there in the first place. What's a human doing with a chronoros lobe? But it was too much a part of everything else – half connections here, bits sticking out there,' he went on, starting to wave his hands about again. 'I couldn't risk it, there was no limit to the damage that could have been done.'

'So what did you do?' Alice asked, now more than a bit alarmed. 'You did something, because my headache's gone!'

'A very clever bit of micro-neurosurgery,' replied the Doctor, beaming again. 'I trained your brain to work with the abnormality rather than against it. You're already reaping some of the benefits – you've just told me that the headache's gone –'

Alice grinned. 'Thank you, I'd almost forgotten what it was like not to hurt.'

'I'll bet,' he smiled. 'But there's more. I had to do a serious bit of rewiring to make this work – but the human brain has lots of bits and pieces that don't normally get used, plenty that I could strip down and recycle.'

The Doctor seemed to be oblivious to everyone's identical looks of horror.

'I just have to switch the rest of it on now, if I may?'

Alice just nodded, and quickly the Doctor took her cup of tea from her, placing it on the floor, then raised his hands again to her temples.

This time she screamed. It wasn't pain, and the initial burst of sensation quickly faded to a manageable level, but it had been, for that moment, completely overwhelming, and Alice blinked a few times before she realised that the Doctor was smiling at her as he grasped her shoulders.

'Welcome to my world,' he said, and Alice was suddenly overwhelmed all over again. It was as if she'd been watching black and white television all her life and suddenly everything was in colour and three dimensions – and so loud! Except that it wasn't anything that she could see or hear, it was just somehow all there in her head. This was going to take some getting used to.

'Breathe, Alice. Don't panic,' said the doctor, calmly and firmly, still holding her steady. 'It's a lot to take in all at once, especially if you're not born doing this, but I promise I'll help you work it out.'

'What exactly did you do?' Jack's voice had a warning edge to it, but Alice was barely aware of it, instead gazing at everything around her, not caring that she was gaping like a fish.

'I preserved the time sensitivity, and wired it up correctly,' replied the Doctor. 'I gave all the signals from that rogue chronoros lobe somewhere to go, somewhere that they could be interpreted. I effectively found you, Alice, a whole new bit of useable brain, made out of spare parts.'

By this time, he was grinning like an idiot, and Alice found that she was doing the same.

'You're like me,' he said, simply. 'Not completely, of course, but you have proper time sense now, and I'm going to teach you how to use it, if you'll let me?'

'Blimey,' was all Alice could manage. The sheer amount of sensory information was almost more than she could deal with, and none of it was anything like the senses she was used to – the time sense didn't look, or sound, or taste, or smell like anything, she couldn't touch it, but it was utterly real.

'This place is stuffed full of weird things,' she finally managed, aware that this wasn't perhaps the most considered response.

'Is the whole world like this, and just nobody knows it?'

'Actually,' the Doctor admitted, 'This is probably the worst place to start – Torchwood's job is to monitor the rift (that's a sort of tear in space and time), and so there's a higher concentration of time distortion here than almost anywhere else in the world. We can start with easier stuff to interpret. You'll pick up the basics soon enough.'

'All that pain – I'd no idea it translated into something so beautiful,' whispered Alice. She found that her eyes were burning, and a tear escaped to roll down her cheek. She didn't care, and didn't brush it off.

'Aw, you think this is good,' said the Doctor eagerly. 'Wait until I show you round the TARDIS.'

Alice laughed. 'You seem so excited – you're looking at me as if I'm your long lost sister or something. If you're some kind of time-sensitive alien then presumably all of you are like this?'

The Doctor's face went blank, and his eyes were suddenly empty. As he looked away, Jack stepped in to cover the awkwardness.

'If I remember rightly, you have a missing person to find, don't you Doctor? Alice?'

Alice jumped up immediately, guilty for having put Brenda and Megan so far out of her mind by everything that had happened.

The Doctor, too, shook himself out of his own reverie.

'Yes. Right. Absolutely,' he replied energetically, unfolding his long legs to stand up, then striding purposefully over to the nearest computer terminal.

'We monitor all missing persons reports, as you know,' the American explained, joining him at the terminal. 'We've had plenty of times when the rift has removed people. Sometimes we even get them back, and it's not pretty.' He grimaced, and Alice noticed that Gwen looked down and wouldn't meet her eye.

'But this is something different,' the Doctor replied. 'She hasn't actually disappeared at all, she's just the teensiest bit out of phase with everyone else – maybe only a fraction of a second. She's a walking living breathing temporal distortion,' he continued, 'which is why you, Alice, were picking up her presence, even if you didn't know that's what it was – like watching someone move behind a curtain – you can't see them, but you can see the ripple in the curtain moving along.'

Alice's eyes widened. 'And those times when I saw things looking blurry for a split second, that was her moving them about, and me just picking up a tiny echo of it?' Alice questioned.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows and quirked a smile at her. 'You're getting the hang of this!'

'Now you're all fixed up,' he went on, tapping his head with a forefinger, 'we should have no problem finding her between us. The trick will be recreating the exact rift activity that did this in the first place, and then reversing it. Luckily, we have here a handy rift manipulator,' he announced, gesturing theatrically towards the tall complex-looking column of technology in the centre of the Torchwood base – 'and upstairs we have a unique and simply brilliant time machine – that's the blue box, by the way – my TARDIS,' he added for Alice's benefit. 'And we have here,' he beamed, pointing triumphantly at himself, 'a certified genius!'

Jack sighed indulgently as the Doctor flexed his fingers in enthusiasm at the thought of getting stuck into this latest challenge.

'I'll take Alice out and try to find our missing person, then, shall I?' he asked.

'And I'll stay here recalibrating your rift manipulator, and don't worry, I'll be careful,' he said, holding a hand up as if to anticipate a warning. 'Time Lord, remember? This really is my area of expertise.' He patted his pockets and drew out the overlarge flashing phone that Alice had seen in the cafe, and handed it to Jack. 'You might find this useful – might not need it now Alice is all wired up right, but you never know – plug it into your vortex manipulator and you can control it from there. When when you've traced her, start transmitting to me, together with the GPS co-ordinates.'

With that, the Doctor was focused on the terminal before him, and Jack gestured for Alice to take his arm and step onto a small platform.

'You missed the scenic route in, on account of being unconscious, so I'll treat you to it now,' he smiled, with a wink.

Gwen rolled her eyes. 'You just can't help yourself, can you, Jack?' she called, laughter in her voice, as Alice and the director of Torchwood slowly disappeared through the ceiling and came to rest between the water sculpture and the TARDIS in the middle of the Plass.


	5. Chapter 5

'Well, that was different,' commented Alice, stepping warily off the flagstone and turning back, just in time to see the American flick into sight.

She blinked. 'Did you just...?'

'Perception filter,' replied Jack, then taking pity on her, elaborated a little. 'The Doctor parked his TARDIS there once and for some reason it left an imprint behind of the TARDIS's own perception filter – its ability to camouflage itself – and we took advantage of it and made it into an invisible lift.' He smiled, and raised his eyebrows, as if challenging her to be disturbed by what he'd just said.

'OK,' Alice nodded, determined not to be phased by anything ever again. 'I thought that stone looked odd – now I know why.'

She turned back to the TARDIS. 'So this supposed to be a camouflage? It doesn't exactly blend into the background, does it?'

Jack snorted with laughter. 'I think the chameleon circuit broke a while back when the Doctor was visiting the 1950s or 1960s – you wouldn't remember, but there was one of these on every corner then – and he's never bothered to mend it. Now I think he quite likes it looking like this.'

Jack considered Alice, as she nodded again, seeming to take everything in her stride. All things considered, the Doctor's latest stray puppy was doing pretty well, and it would be good for him to find someone who could share even a little of his perception of the universe.

Meanwhile, Alice was wondering whether Jack was old enough really to remember the 1950s – he looked perhaps only a decade older than her – but she didn't comment. Maybe his wrong-ness was something to do with it. Her new time sense told her that there was something very odd indeed about the Captain, but she didn't feel quite brave enough to ask what it was. Maybe later.

Or maybe she would ask the Doctor instead – it seemed that Jack himself hadn't been too keen on explaining.

There were lots of things she would asking about later.

The Captain paused for a moment to synchronise the Doctor's strange contraption with a device he was wearing on his left wrist. Alice tried valiantly to banish all thoughts of Knight Rider from her mind, and just ended up having to stifle a giggle instead. The sudden freedom from headaches was making her feel almost tipsy, and she really hoped that she hadn't turned into someone who regularly giggled – that was almost worse than being someone who sighed.

So instead she stuffed her hands deep into her pockets, and while she waited for Jack to finish doing whatever he was doing, she started to take in the scenery with her new found time sense. Combined with sight as well she quickly found that it was just too much – a jumble of information, nothing making sense at all, so she closed her eyes, and tried to close her ears to the sounds of the Plass, and concentrate only on the shifting patterns of time.

It was the most extraordinary sensation, but the more she concentrated, the more there was to experience. Not just the rift itself, which was the sensory equivalent of an endlessly streaming fiery pillar, its tendrils flickering out all over the city; she went deeper still, willing her mind to explore the depths of this new ability.

Then she was lost in it. She'd once been caught in a rip current, and this was just as terrifying – one moment there was solid ground beneath her feet, and the next she was swept away with chaos breaking over her head and pulling her under.

This was the same blind panic: there was no sight or sound any more, just time and space, and she was falling and the earth was spinning beneath her feet, and the passing of each nanosecond tore through her mind like a laser.

She shouldn't have put her hands in her pockets, it turned out, because she really needed them to break her fall. But by the time she hit the ground she wasn't aware of the physical world at all.

...

'Alice!'

Awareness returned slowly. And quite painfully. At least a bruised elbow and knee was nothing compared with what she was used to. Alice finally opened her eyes, squinting groggily against the uncomfortable brightness of the sun to see the concerned face of the Captain peering down at her as she lay on the pavement. She seemed to be spending a lot of the time lying on pavements today.

'Did you hit your head?'

Alice lifted a hand to the back of her head – nothing felt wrong, and it didn't hurt, in any case. Unlike her left elbow, which felt very sore indeed.

'No, I'm fine,' Alice replied, absently. 'Ow,' she added, as she tried to use her left arm to push herself upright.

'Gave me quite a scare then, Alice,' said the Captain, carefully. 'Do I need to get the Doctor up here to check everything's OK?'

Alice reminded herself that only a few minutes ago the Doctor had been messing around with her head and talking about neurosurgery. No wonder the Captain sounded worried.

'No, no, I'm fine. I think I probably just need to not concentrate so hard when I try and work out all the time stuff. Just for now.'

Jack gave her a hand up, and she rubbed her sore elbow. It was going to bruise very nicely.

'You know, the earth is spinning?' Alice asked, only half aware that she must sound like she'd taken something illegal. The Captain looked at her critically.

'So they tell me,' he offered. 'Tell you what, try not to think about it too hard for a while. Not til you're a bit more used to it. And preferably not until you're back with the Doctor again – he has quicker reflexes than me.'

He held out his left arm, and she linked her own gladly with his. Even trying not to think about the movement of the earth and the orbits of the planets and the complexity of their interactions, Alice still felt just a bit wobbly.

'It's this way,' said Alice, pointing up towards Bute Street. 'I mean, if Megan is still at home.'

'Bute Street it is, then – lead the way.'

They set off, Jack glancing occasionally down at the device attached to his wrist strap, and Alice wondering what she would be able to discern about Megan's location now that her time sense was working properly.

'Alice, if we can do this without Megan's mother knowing we're involved – keep it just as a normal missing persons case – then that's what I'd prefer to do,' Jack warned as they walked along. 'I'll try to keep out of sight when we get there, so you'll need to find Megan, and keep her mother talking, while I transmit the numbers to the Doctor back at the Hub.'

'How long will it be then before he can do his stuff with the rift, you know, and get her back?' Alice asked. 'I mean, what will that even look like, and how will we know when he's ready?'

'Oh, I think you'll know alright.' Jack snorted with laughter again. 'The Doctor's always been adamant that when the Rift's active it's sort of obvious to him. I'm kinda hoping that once he sets the process going, you'll be able to see Megan and pull her out.'

'Ah.' Alice frowned. 'This Rift. You do know that it feels quite... intense, don't you?'

'It's an enormous tear in space and time, Alice, of course it's going to be intense.'

The Captain stopped and turned to look at her. 'You trusted the Doctor to poke around in your head – and even I've never let him do that to me. So you need to trust him to get this right, too. I'd trust him with my life.' He looked distant for a moment, as if remembering something. Then shook himself out of it, and strode onwards at a pace that made Alice run a few steps to catch up.

'The Doctor seems to think I'll know what to do,' she observed. 'What do you think?'

'I think,' said the Captain, without looking at her, 'that however much I like to think I'm the expert, when it comes to it, I won't have a clue what's going on, and you'll just have to trust your instincts.'

There was nothing really to say to that.


	6. Chapter 6

The first part of the plan went remarkably smoothly, Alice thought. Brenda had been happy to see her, and amazed that she was looking so well. Alice remained on the doorstep, keeping the conversation going at a surface level, while focusing most of her attention on locating Megan.

The Doctor had been right – it wasn't hard to spot the missing girl. Alice's newly-attuned sense of time showed her exactly where the anomaly was – it felt like the slightest indentation in the fabric of time, nothing more than a ripple, and the more Alice concentrated, the more clearly she could almost see the outline of the young woman, fading in and out of focus.

Alice risked a glance sideways at Jack, who was pressed against the side of the house, and leaning just far enough round the corner to see her signal – a brief thumbs-up indicated that Megan was there, and all he had to do was point the Doctor's home-made device roughly in the right direction and transmit the figures via his vortex manipulator back to the Hub.

But something wasn't quite right. The figures weren't stabilising, and Jack inwardly cursed this complication – he wasn't sure what the fluctuating numbers meant, but he had a feeling that it wasn't good. His fears were confirmed when the Doctor's voice spoke through his earpiece.

'Jack, the readings are all over the place – she can't be in a stable phased state, and I can't match the fluctuations fast enough from here. It's as if there's something in that phased time-pocket with her, something that wants to keep her there. I'm coming in the TARDIS – don't let Alice do anything til I get there, it's too dangerous.'

The Captain sent back a single click as an affirmative, and looked back again round the side of the house. Alice and the missing girl's mother were nowhere to be seen.

Cursing a little less silently this time, Jack pressed himself up against the wall just by the front door, and listened for any sound from in the house – there were voices, but it seemed that they'd walked all the way round to the back garden. He knew he had to warn Alice before she tried anything – he wished he'd not said all that stuff about 'trust your instincts'.

Jack could see Alice and Brenda chatting in the garden, with Alice looking more and more worried. He wasn't sure, but there seemed to be something he could just perceive, on the very edge of his senses, in the garden with them. On a hunch, he directed the Doctor's makeshift device at it, but if anything, the numbers increased the speed of their fluctuation. This really wasn't good. Messing with the rift was like Russian roulette at the best of times. If the Doctor said he couldn't control it, then nobody else would be able to either.

Ducking round behind the house again, Jack used his comm unit to contact Gwen.

'Get down here, both of you,' he whispered, urgently. 'We might need backup. You've got the GPS coordinates. Run, or take the SUV, I don't care, just get here.'

Blessing the wonders of Retcon, and knowing that whatever happened he could make sure that Brenda never remembered it in the morning, Jack came out from the side of the house into the garden, inadequately excused his presence to older woman, and took Alice by the arm.

'The Doctor's on his way. He says don't do anything til he gets here. OK?'

Alice shook her head. 'I don't know what's happening, but I don't think we can wait.'

'What do you mean?'

'It's getting worse, Jack. She's stuck in there, and it's tearing her apart!'

'Yeah. The readings are all over the place. But that's why we have to wait for the Doctor. We thought it was a simple question of being slightly out of phase, but it's not, it's unstable. The Doctor thinks there's something else in there with her.'

'So that's why I've got to do it now,' Alice stated, shaking her arm free of the Captain's grip, and turning towards Brenda, who hadn't said a word, but had been looking between the two of them as they argued.

'Brenda, I'm going to try and get your daughter back,' Alice said, simply, and before Jack could stop her, she'd run three paces into the middle of the garden and disappeared.

...

Jack was saved from having to explain by the welcome wheezing, grinding noise of the TARDIS materialising. She had barely solidified, when the Doctor bounded out, looking worried, and stopped just as suddenly, arms wheeling, as he stared in horror at the space where Alice had been just a moment before.

'No, no, no...' he whispered. 'What did you not understand about "do nothing until I get here",' demanded the Doctor, his voice raised either in anger or in fear, Jack wasn't sure.

'I couldn't stop her, she just looked at me, and then walked right into it.'

'But I can't stabilise it, even with the TARDIS,' the Doctor returned, panic in his voice, and running his hands through his hair and grasping it, as if to try and control a situation that had spiralled into chaos and even tragedy. 'There's definitely something in there with them, and you know what kind of things live in the rift, Jack.'

The Captain closed his eyes for a moment, not wanting to remember their last encounter with one of the more destructive rift-dwelling creatures, when it escaped the bounds of the rift and wreaked destruction in the Welsh countryside.

'That's what's increasing the severity of the fluctuations,' the Doctor explained. 'The phasing is losing what little integrity it ever had, and I've got no way of getting either of them back.'


	7. Chapter 7

_Author Note: Thank you to the kind reader who pointed out a weirdness in chapter order - this has now been corrected. So, if you read chapter 6 and thought, 'that looks awfully like chapter 4', then please do try chapter 6 again, as it is now as it should be (I think!). In the mean time, on with the story, and things aren't going well for Alice..._

The sunlight of the back garden in Bute receded into a distant background: still there, but inaccessible, hidden behind a barrier that seethed in constant motion. Alice struggled against the abhorrent distortion of time which enveloped her, suffocating her and deadening her limbs, seeping into every pore. She fought to draw a breath, and forced her eyes to open and pierce the swirling chaotic fluctuations of time. It might have been beautiful if it weren't so terrifying, and if she weren't caught in the middle of it.

It took all her will power just to keep from curling up in a ball. Will power, and the knowledge that Megan had been stuck in here for a week.

Alice raised her head again, closed her eyes, and reached out with her mind into the turmoil, seeking out a familiar shape, hoping that Megan was somehow still here, still accessible.

There. She opened her eyes, trying to keep concentrating on what she'd perceived. It could have been her own shadow, flickering in and out of existence, but Alice knew that this was Megan, and instinctively took a step forward, reaching out.

Her hand closed on thin air; the shadowy figure had faded again. Of course; time was unstable here, not only relative to Jack and the Doctor, back in what Alice thought of as the real world, but even within the rift itself.

Alice blew out a shaky breath, and reached out again.

This time her hand closed on something, but it wasn't Megan. Forcing herself to look at her right hand, she screamed. She was grasping something long and gelatinous – a tendril whipping from side to side. It burned her palm and fingers like acid. Even as she released it in disgust, Alice saw to her horror that the tendril was only one of dozens, all oozing and snaking towards her, with the dark shape of something bigger behind them.

Alice stumbled sideways, swallowing back bile, and found herself knocking into something solid. Instinctively clutching onto it as she fell, Alice hit the ground to discover that she was grasping Megan by the upper arms. The girl's eyes were open, but she seemed unseeing, her face a fixed, blank mask. But she was warm – not dead – and at least now they were touching, Megan was no longer phasing in and out, but remaining solid, if unresponsive.

Alice quickly scrambled to her knees, keeping hold of Megan's wrist in her left hand – her right hand was too painful from where she had grasped the tendrilled creature. In the shadows she could still make out the shape of it, flitting effortlessly through the distortions like a fish through seaweed. But it wasn't the rift-creature which made her stomach plummet, it was the fact that though she could still see the shape of Jack and Brenda in the garden, they seemed to be moving in extreme slow motion, as if time was moving faster here than there; that, and the fact that she realised with a cold dread that she had no idea how to get herself and Megan out of the rift and back into real time.


	8. Chapter 8

_Author note: Apologies again for the fact that when I originally posted chapter 6, uploaded the wrong thing - so if you looked at chapter 6 earlier and thought' that looks like chapter 4 again', you were right - but it has now been corrected, so it would be worth going back and reading it again, otherwise the rest of the story may not make so much sense! Thankyou to the kind reader who pointed out the error..._

Jack turned to Brenda, who was standing with her hand over her mouth, eyes red-rimmed and staring. All of this was clearly beyond her.

'Go inside, and stay at the front of the house,' he told her, urgently, but she seemed too shocked to move.

Jack breathed a sigh of relief a second later when a screech of tyres signalled the arrival of Gwen and Ianto in the Torchwood SUV. He used the comm to summon them round to the garden.

'Gwen, get her out of here,' he said, shortly, gesturing towards the older woman, and Gwen was quick to do so.

That left Jack, Ianto and the Doctor circling the area of temporal disturbance which the Time Lord could clearly sense, and which Jack and Ianto could monitor via the device which was still connected to the vortex manipulator. The numbers were flickering so quickly now that it was impossible to keep track of them.

The Doctor held up his sonic screwdriver and listened intently for a few moments, then shook his head in frustration.

'There's only one thing we can do,' he said, anguish evident in his voice. 'We need to stabilise this, and we can only do that by shutting it down completely.'

'But they're both still in there!' Jack couldn't believe the Doctor would give up on them when they were still trapped. 'What happens to them if we do that?'

The Doctor looked away.

'Doctor? What happens?' Jack asked again, a warning edge to his voice.

'As the phasing stabilises, the rift will simply eject them. And we'll have no way of knowing where or when.'

'Oh God. I can't do that to them,' Jack breathed. He had carried alone for so long the burden of knowing what the rift could do to people, until Gwen had discovered the secret. They had never talked about it again since.

'There's no choice, Jack,' came the Doctor's bleak reply. 'For all we know, they're already dead in there. And don't forget about what's in there with them. The sooner we can seal this off, the less chance there is for it to escape.'

The Doctor reset his sonic, and glanced across again. Jack said nothing. There was nothing to say.

The familiar whine as he held it up again was cut short as two bodies seemingly exploded out of nowhere and knocked the Doctor off his feet. All three landed in a tangle of limbs against the back wall of the garden.

...

Alice was starting to panic. The creature was swimming towards them again, Megan was a dead weight, and Alice's right hand was pulsing and burning across the palm and fingers. All around them, the fluctuations in temporal phasing were becoming so fast that they almost shimmered. That alone was almost enough to overwhelm Alice's untrained and raw time sense, and she staggered and fell again.

Suddenly, a new sound cut through the turbulence, a high pitched whine that sliced into Alice's head and made her cry out in pain, and she clung on to Megan's limp body with both hands, oblivious to the pain in her hand. The currents of fluctuating time around them suddenly juddered and stiffened, and began to coalesce; Alice felt the breath squeezed out of her, and wondered if she was dying. She used the last of her strength to haul Megan upright, and following some instinct she couldn't explain, she hurled them both towards the sound.

For a second, it felt as if they might be flying. Then something impacted hard with Alice shoulder, and she fell, spinning round and landing painfully on her injured hand. She rolled, but couldn't seem to work out which way was up, and settled for pressing her face into what felt and smelt like grass. Almost weeping at the ordinariness of it, she screwed her eyes shut, taking in great gulps of grass-scented air, and trying to stifle the panicky sobs that were threatening to escape.

It took Jack a moment to react. The Doctor had been propelled several metres, and though he had obviously hit the wall head first, he was already untangling himself and staggering upright by the time Jack offered him a hand. There was a trail of blood by his right ear, and he looked a little pale, but Jack was more concerned about the others.

Alice had rolled over and was clearly alive, if not well. The other girl, Megan, didn't look to be in good shape. Jack quickly felt for a pulse, and there was one, although it was weak and thread, and he had to look very carefully to detect the rise and fall of her chest.

'Doctor?' Jack queried, hoping the Time Lord would know what to do.

'Let me see,' he offered, and knelt down, quickly feeling around the unconscious girl's head for injuries, and then lifting each eyelid in turn to check her pupil response. He retrived the sonic screwdriver from where it had fallen, and reset it, passing it over her body twice then checking the readings.

'She's certainly very dehydrated,' he concluded, 'and in shock. Blood pressure is down, heart rate is up. Physically this is survivable, but I don't know if there's other significant damage until I have a proper look.'

The Doctor placed his hands either side of her face, and closed his eyes in concentration. Jack glanced sideways at Alice; but she was still lying face down on the grass, but her breathing was audible, and she seemed to be in no immediate danger. He turned back to look at the Doctor, and was alarmed to see the pain etched on his pale face. In fact, his arms were starting to shake from the effort, and Jack was on the point of seeing if he could break the telepathic connection when the Doctor withdrew himself, and sat heavily, almost overbalancing. He took several deep breaths, and was obviously in pain.

'Doctor?'

'Give me a minute,' came the terse reply. 'In fact, check on Alice.'

Alice lay, drinking in the smell and feel of the grass. The return of her physical senses was gradual, and uncomfortable. It took long moments for the cacophony of sound to coalesce into a voice, and longer still for her to be able to take in what it was saying.

'Alice?' It was Jack, calling her name. Opening her eyes a crack, she sought out his face, and blinked several times to get it into focus. The daylight hurt her eyes.

It took another few seconds for her to recognise the sensation in her left hand. She clumsily turned her head to look, and saw that she was still holding Megan's wrist in a death grip, and Jack was having to forcefully prise her finger off, one by one. She closed her eyes again and tried to relax her grip. Her fingers ached from it, but that was nothing compared to the streak of raw agony across the palm and fingers of her right hand.

As her ordinary senses reasserted themselves, Alice was suddenly overwhelmed by them, and she only just had the presence of mind to roll to the side before she heaved, gagging and choking, gradually becoming aware of Jack's hand rubbing circles on her back as she tried to steady her breathing and get herself under control.

A shadow fell across her, and she looked up to see that the Doctor was now standing.

'Jack, get Ianto to help you take Megan into the TARDIS. She needs a saline drip, and keep her warm. Add your usual stuff to the drip – enough to wipe out the last week – and she'll be fine by the morning.'

The instructions were given in an almost off-hand way, and the Doctor didn't look at either Jack or Megan. Alice shielded her eyes to look up at the Time Lord's silhouette against the brightness of the late afternoon sun.

The Doctor waited until the others were safely inside the TARDIS.

'What exactly did you think you were doing?' he asked. Alice hoped his tone of voice was misleading, because it sounded like cold anger.

'I was trying to save a girl's life, Doctor,' Alice retorted, weakly. 'That's what we came here for, isn't it? You thought I could do it!' She scrambled to her feet, but it still felt like the Doctor was towering over her.

'Yes, I did,' the Doctor conceded. 'But then Jack told you to stop because the fluctuations were too unpredictable.' He took a step towards her. 'You could have died. Or worse.' His voice was clipped, his eyes dark and haunted. 'You just walked into a rift in space and time, and you're unbelievably lucky to have just walked out again without a scratch! Just because you can sense it, doesn't mean you can control it.'

He shook his head and turned away again. Alice approached him, tentatively.

'I know I've got a lot to learn, Doctor. You said you'd teach me yourself, remember?' Alice reminded him. The Doctor turned back towards her, and there was fire in his eyes.

'But I've been in your head, Alice, I know exactly what you're like – I should never have let you come here on your own, never let you anywhere a situation where you could take such a stupid, stupid, risk!' By the end he was shouting, his chest heaving in anger, skin pale and dark eyes blazing.

Alice flung a hand out to brace herself against the side of the house, wincing as the pain of the burn flared white-hot.

'You've been in my head, but that was before you fixed me – you saw my memories of the worst three months of my life!' she shouted back. 'You think you know me because you've seen all that? You don't know me at all.'

'Then I've made you into something that shouldn't be,' the Doctor retorted, coldly, and stepped towards her. 'And I can fix that. Your time sense can easily be disconnected again.'

Instinctively she took a pace backwards, but the Time Lord kept coming, and his hands were back out of his pockets and reaching for her face.

'No!' pleaded Alice. 'You think I've got reckless because of what you've given me? You think this time sense has made me into what? A liability? A danger?' Her eyes darted towards the TARDIS, where Jack was now standing in the doorway, not knowing whether or how to intervene.

'What are you doing, Doc?' Jack's question was gentle.

'I've got to,' the Doctor replied to Jack, his own voice harsh with still barely-controlled anger. 'She's only human. She shouldn't have this. It's too big a responsibility, being the only one. She'll try and fix everything, and it can't be fixed, not every time.'

The Doctor's hands, almost at Alice's face, were trembling, but her back was now pressed against the solid wall of the house, and there was nowhere to run. She was confronted by the Time Lord as he appeared to her battered time sense – the oncoming storm, impossibly old, unstoppable. She shook her head in denial and fear.

'Please, Doctor, you don't understand,' she whispered, her eyes never leaving his face. 'You gave me such a gift, but that doesn't mean it's yours to take away! I'm so alive now, so alive, more than I've ever been, and you can't take this away from me, please, you can't...' her breath hitched in her throat, as the Doctor's cool fingers made contact with her temples.

'I know,' he said. 'And I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.'


	9. Chapter 9

The touch of the Time Lord's mind was like ice, and Alice reeled at the invasion, dimly feeling her eyes roll up in her head and her legs give way, but the physical world was irrelevant now, for this was a battle of the mind.

And the Time Lord was stronger, far stronger. His mind as it attacked hers was powerful and subtle, like a blade in the hand of a master swordsman.

Alice fought against the cold violation of her mind, and even as her psyche screamed in pain she railed against it, imagining herself to be pure flame, flickering and constantly in motion, just as the strands of time had been when she had been trapped in the rift.

Alice willed the flames to reach higher, even as the sword pierced more deeply, then without warning there was a jolt like two powerful magnets attracting and locking together. An image formed between the two battling minds – one not from Alice's own memories, but from the mind of the Time Lord. An image of the Doctor, and a woman Alice didn't know, but the Doctor's mind involuntarily supplied the name: Donna. An image of the Doctor taking from Donna's mind by force everything that had come to make her what she was, while she pleaded with him...

The image flickered and died, and was replaced by chaos. Flame and sword dissolved in an onslaught of raw emotion – nine centuries of anger, hurt and grief, unlocked by one powerful memory. It was too much. Alice was washed away and lost, and then there was nothing at all for a long time.

...

Jack was the first to react, darting forward to kneel between the two crumpled bodies, and hardly knowing which of them to check first.

'My God, what's he done?' Jack whispered, as he felt for a pulse on Alice's neck. There was the tiniest erratic flutter beneath the clammy skin, but no rise and fall of the chest.

'Ianto!' Jack called. The Welshman had just emerged from the TARDIS. 'She's not breathing. Take over here, and I'll check the Doctor.'

Ianto was immediately at Alice's side, rolling her onto her back so that he could pinch her nose closed and breathe for her.

Jack's attention was now on the unconscious Time Lord, but he barely had time to ascertain that he was alive and breathing before the Doctor groaned and blinked.

'Doctor, what happened?' Jack asked, concern etched on his face.

'Not sure,' came the mumbled reply. 'I was trying to shut down the connections to the chronoros lobe, and then something happened...'

'So why isn't she breathing?' Jack's voice had a steely edge beneath the surface anxiety.

The effect of Jack's words was instantaneous. The Doctor went from semi-conscious to alert and upright in half a second, pushing Jack and then Ianto out of the way and grasping Alice's face none too gently with his strong fingers.

'Come on!' he urged, closing his eyes in evident concentration.

There was a horribly long ten-second of silence, then Alice's whole body suddenly jerked as she took one gulping, sobbing breath, and then another. The Doctor didn't let go, but changed his hold on her so that he was cradling her head and shoulders against his chest and resting his chin on the top of her head.

Alice just focused on trying to draw air into her lungs. She was vaguely aware that someone was holding her, but it wasn't until the dizziness faded that she regained enough awareness to realise that it was the Doctor, and flinched away from him, scooting backwards in a confusing mix of fear and pity, as the memory of the last few minutes coalesced in her mind.

The Doctor, for his part, looked away, then down at his hands held in front of him, as if surprised and shocked by what they had done, and what they had so nearly done moments before.

'Alice, you still look white as a sheet,' Jack noticed. 'Are you OK?'

'Yeah,' Alice replied, but her voice sounded distant even to her own ears. 'Hurt my hand, I think. Actually, it really hurts now...' She cradled it to her chest, and tried to breathe through her nose to ride out the waves of pain.

Jack reached out and grasped her right forearm, turning her hand so that it was palm up. As if through a fog, Alice heard his sharp intake of breath, but by that stage the world was starting to tunnel in, and even the pain in her hand felt like it belonged to someone else.

Everything swam for a moment, and the next thing Alice knew she was lying on her side on the grass, with Jack behind her, his hand warm and heavy on her shoulder. The Doctor was crouching in front of her, gently holding her injured hand in his, and running the sonic screwdriver over it.

'I need to get her to the TARDIS medbay, right now,' he said, quickly and quietly, speaking over her head, directly to Jack.

Alice felt the Captain nod, and he helped her to stand, then seemed to change his mind when her legs failed to support her. She found herself in his arms, and being carried the short distance to the blue box. The Doctor still had hold of her hand, but her awareness drifted in and out.

When Alice next opened her eyes, she was lying on what looked like a hospital bed, but the room she was in looked nothing like any hospital she'd ever been in, and there was something very odd about the whole place. Alice tried not to delve too deeply into what her time sense was telling her – she was too exhausted to cope with it. Instead, she focused on her physical senses, turning her head to the side so that she could look the Doctor in the eye, trying to suppress the instinctive fear at seeing him again.

'This isn't how I was going to show you round the TARDIS,' the Doctor apologised. He had his geeky glasses on again, and was fiddling with something on the monitor by the bed. He looked across at Alice.

'Can you flex your fingers?'

Alice looked down to find her right hand and forearm swathed in some sort of bandage. A thin tube emerged from the bandage and led up to a bag of fluid hooked to a stand by the bed. She looked back at her hand, and bent her fingers a little way. She grimaced. It was still very sore, but not nearly as bad as it had been, and overall she felt incomparably better than just before she'd passed out.

'Not bad,' the Doctor commented. 'It'll be painful for a while yet, but it will heal eventually. I'm assuming that it's from whatever that creature was in the rift?'

Alice nodded. 'I don't know what it was. It kept phasing in and out, so I didn't get a proper look. I grabbed it by mistake.'

'You were extremely lucky then,' the Doctor said, seriously. 'I have met rift-dwelling creatures before, and believe me, they can do a lot worse than burn your hand and give you blood poisoning.'

'Blood poisoning?' Alice asked, alarmed. She tried to sit up, but found she didn't have the strength, and the Doctor gently pressed on her shoulder to get her to lie back on the bed.

'Mmm. It's clearing nicely now, but you won't feel quite right for another day or so, and no getting up for at least another four hours.'

Alice lay quietly for a minute, processing everything, while the Doctor fiddled again with the bedside monitor controls. Eventually she couldn't hold the question in any longer:

'Doctor, are you still going to take the time sense away?'

He looked up, his face momentarily unguarded, both old and young.

'Do you think I should?' he asked, carefully.

'I can see why you thought you should,' Alice conceded. 'It's true. I didn't know what I was doing. And it was terrifying. I thought I was going to die.' She spoke quietly, and looked at the ceiling rather than make eye contact with the Doctor. The memory of it was raw. 'But I can't guarantee that I wouldn't do the same thing again,' she admitted.

Alice looked across the room at Megan, who was lying in the bed opposite, and looking considerably healthier, though still asleep.

'She's going to be alright, isn't she?'

The Doctor nodded.

'Then it was a good risk, wasn't it?'

The Doctor stopped fiddling with the monitor and looked straight at Alice.

'You don't know what it's like, to see someone's timelines suddenly almost disappear as if they've been switched off,' he told her, his voice steady, but full of barely-controlled emotion. 'That's what I felt, Alice, when I arrived to see you disappear into the rift. It should have been me. I'm the one who can see this stuff, and control it. It should never have been you. But as long as you have this time sense, you'll keep on finding yourself in situations where you feel it has to be you.'

'I understand.'

'So that's why I can't leave you here in Cardiff, with your time sense working overtime and Jack just aching to offer you a job that will put in that position every single day.'

Alice swallowed. It made sense. She'd had a few glorious hours of seeing the world in technicolour, and now everything was going to be black and white again.

'So how about it?' the Doctor asked.

'I said I understand, Doctor,' Alice answered, her voice tight. 'It doesn't mean I have to like it, but I'll not fight you again, it nearly killed me!' She made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob.

'Sorry about that,' the Doctor offered, with the tiniest of raised eyebrows. 'Very sorry, actually. But what I meant was that if I can't leave you here in Cardiff, then really the best thing would be for you to come with me, so that I can train you to use your time sense properly, and make sure that you're not the one who has to take all the insane risks.'

'What? Really?' Alice couldn't help sitting up again, eyes wide in disbelief, and a grin that only faded when a wave of dizziness swept over her.

The Doctor pushed her flat and the world swam back into focus. 'What aspect of "you have blood poisoning so you can't get up" wasn't clear?' he demanded, exasperated, but with humour.

'Sorry,' Alice grinned.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. 'I have a feeling that teaching you anything at all is going to be very hard work.'

Alice resolved to behave impeccably and not try to get up again until the Doctor said she could.


	10. Chapter 10

Jack came into the medbay five minutes later. Alice smiled at him, he returned it with a wink behind the Doctor's back. Alice wondered what the two of them had said to each other while she'd been out cold.

'Doc, can I take Megan home now?' Jack asked. 'Ianto's on the case fixing a story to cover her disappearance, and her mother's sleeping off a very mild dose of Retcon, just enough to wipe out what happened in the garden.'

The Doctor checked Megan over one last time, then disconnected her drip, and held a device that Alice didn't recognise over the canola site for a few seconds – when he had finished, the mark from the canola had completely gone.

'Dermal regenerator,' the Doctor explained, seeing Alice's questioning look. 'It's best if we leave as little evidence as we can.' He nodded to Jack, who scooped Megan up easily in his arms, and carried her out of the TARDIS.

'Can I go and see Brenda and Megan when they wake up?' Alice asked the Doctor.

'If it's over four hours from now, then yes,' he smirked, looking at her over his glasses.

'Hmm. Then while I'm stuck here, why don't you start teaching me some of the stuff I need to know? You talked about timelines – can you tell me more about that?'

'Later,' he nodded. 'Timelines are complex, and confusing. Let's start with something simple.'

He cast around in the medbay and came back with two pieces of rock. To Alice's eyes they seemed pretty ordinary grey, jagged lumps. He held them out, one in each hand.

'Try to focus just on the rocks for now – try to ignore everything in the background,' he instructed.

Alice tried. But as she focused her sense of time on the rocks, she quickly became overwhelmed with the sheer complexity of the timescape all around her. She huffed in frustration.

'I don't even know what I'm looking for!' she sighed. 'Is there any way you can show me?'

The Doctor put the rocks down and took his glasses off, folding them and carefully sliding them into his jacket pocket. He bowed his head and rubbed his eyes for a moment before replying.

'Yes, I can show you,' he said, eventually. 'But I'm not sure you'll like it.'

'What do you mean?'

'Last time I was in your head I nearly killed you, Alice. And even if I hadn't? I wasn't exactly gentle, and it was still an unforgivable violation. I wouldn't blame you if you'd been put of telepathy for life.'

Alice considered this. She'd put off thinking about what had happened in the garden, after she and Megan had managed to escape. The mental battle with the Time Lord had been almost more terrifying than the minutes she's spent in the rift, but it all felt more like a dream, and there was still something about the Doctor that made her want to trust him, despite everything. It was about time she made up her mind: either she trusted him wholeheartedly, with her life, and would spend the next however long staying with him while he trained her time sense, or she didn't trust him at all, in which case she would end up walking out of the TARDIS with no time sense anyway.

'I'd like you to try,' she said, finally.

The Doctor nodded, acknowledging that it had taken some courage for Alice to decide to let him in. He adjusted the bed so that Alice could sit up comfortably, then dragged a stool over so that he could sit beside it. He put the two rocks on Alice's lap, on top of the covers.

'Ready?' he asked.

'Just do it,' Alice replied, determined to relax and allow the Doctor to see that she really did trust him.

He scooted a couple of inches closer to her, and then tentatively put his arm around her shoulders so that he could comfortably make fingertip contact with the far side of her face. His fingers still felt cold, and Alice couldn't help tensing.

'Sorry,' she muttered.

'It's me who should be sorry. Do you want to leave this a while longer?'

'No, let's just do it. It'll be OK once I've got used to the idea.'

The Doctor said nothing more. Cool fingers sought out her temple again, and as she closed her eyes, the brush of the Doctor's mind against hers was infinitely gentle. She wondered how much concentration it was taking for him to be this careful.

Beside her, he chuckled quietly. 'A lot,' he replied.

Alice found herself relaxing, and the strange sensation of not being alone in her own head was back again. It actually felt less unnatural this time. Maybe she was getting used to it.

'Look back at the stones,' the Doctor suggested, his voice now speaking directly into her thoughts. She wondered whether he was also speaking aloud.

'No, there's no need,' he laughed back. 'And I'll try not to hear anything that's not intended to be heard, though it's hard in here – do you always think this noisily?'

Alice reflected that she probably didn't, and that the events of the day may have contributed to the high level of thought-traffic going on inside her head. The Doctor gave another mental snort of laughter. It was beginning to feel quite cosy.

'The stones, Alice,' he reminded her. 'Focus on the stones. And I can't believe you think I'm "cosy"!'

'Sorry,' Alice thought, wondering whether visualising a smiley face would work like an emoticon through the telepathic link.

'Please can we concentrate on the task in hand?' the Doctor sighed, exasperated, but still with good humour.

They focused on the stones, and it was quickly so interesting that Alice forgot all her other questions and concentrated entirely on following what the Doctor's thoughts were showing her. She marvelled at the way that the complexities of time seemed so coherent in the background of the Doctor's mind, and she enjoyed seeking out and trying to interpret the much simpler temporal signatures around the two rocks.

...

After quite a bit of practice and coaching, Alice could tell the rocks apart from their temporal signatures alone. She could also sense just a little bit of pride leaking through the telepathic link. But she was also exhausted. The Doctor was right; she really wasn't well, still.

'Time to stop, I think,' said the Doctor in her mind. Not surprisingly, he'd picked up her increasing tiredness.

When he slipped away, Alice felt suddenly and shockingly empty and lonely, and couldn't prevent a soft gasp from escaping. She turned her head quickly to the side as if to reassure herself that the Doctor was still there, now he was no longer in direct contact with her mind.

He looked pretty washed out himself as he extracted his arm from behind her shoulders, and shook it a few times, as if he had pins and needles. Alice recalled him admitting that it took real effort to be so gentle in the telepathic contact.

'You don't often do that, do you?' she asked.

'Hmm? No. Not any more.'

Alice desperately wanted to ask more. There was a profound loneliness about the Doctor just in that moment, but she couldn't find the words to ask him about it. Perhaps it was better that she didn't.

'Go to sleep, Alice,' he said, with a small smile. 'I said four hours, but that's before I completely exhausted you with a two-hour lesson in temporal analysis. When you wake up you'll probably be OK to get up properly.'

Alice nodded, and her eyelids began to droop of their own accord, even before the Doctor had finished lowering the bed back to horizontal. She blinked them open one last time to see the Doctor stand, stretch and rub his face tiredly, before she gladly succumbed to sleep.


	11. Chapter 11

The Doctor stood for a moment, looking down at Alice as she slept. He was outwardly still, but aware that there were powerful memories and emotions simmering beneath the surface, and threatening to overwhelm him. Again.

He left Alice sleeping, and made his way slowly to the library. It was a good room to think in, and the armchairs were comfortable.

He sank into one, and smiled at the TARDIS' thoughtfulness in providing him with a cheerful open fire and a cup of sweet tea. She hummed in response – a familiar comforting presence, with just a tinge of concern. He telepathically reassured her that all would be well.

The Doctor deliberately set aside the future implications of leaving Alice with her chronoros lobe intact and functional, and forced himself to revisit the scene in the garden when he'd almost killed the girl.

He wasn't absolutely sure what had happened there. Removing the time sense was perfectly justifiable: she shouldn't have it anyway, after all. And it should have been easy. But something had distracted him from his single-minded purpose, and he'd ended up engaged in a mental battle which had only been ended by the horrific, stomach-churning reminder of the last time he'd forced his way into someone's mind.

He'd been completely floored by it, by the reminder of what he'd had to do to Donna. And the flood of emotion had overwhelmed Alice's weaker human mind and body. The Doctor could feel the adrenaline flicker through his body at the thought of what had almost happened, and shuddered, taking a steadying breath.

He'd had no choice with Donna, had he? She would have died within minutes if he'd not acted. He knew that intellectually, but clearly the emotional response to it had never been dealt with properly, otherwise it wouldn't have reared up like that. It had been months in the Doctor's personal timeline since leaving Donna that the Doctor had finally made himself go and tell Jack what he'd done – he'd had to go back in time to the same day, so that Jack didn't inadvertently contact Donna and trigger the reaction which would have killed her anyway. That had been one of the worst times of his long life.

But Alice was different. There was no physiological reason why the chronoros lobe should harm her, and with practice she could even learn to interpret much of the new time-sense. She'd done very well with the stones, better than he'd thought she would.

So it wasn't that which had made him feel he had to take it from her. It was the risk-taking. So many years of travelling with fragile humans, and he still couldn't cope with the fact that they frequently risked their lives for each other, and sometimes even for him. One by one, he'd lost almost all of them, and by the end, they would all be gone. But that didn't mean he had to constantly fight the urge to protect them while he could.

There was no going back. Alice was his responsibility now, and he would do all he could to make sure that she understood what she was sensing, so that her time sense could become something that would keep her safer, not drive her into danger.

The Doctor sipped his tea, thoughts wandering, until he was almost dozing off. Maintaining the extreme gentleness in the telepathic link with Alice for a whole two hours had completely exhausted him. Luckily, but the time he fell properly asleep, the teacup was empty, and the carpet in the library was soft enough to stop it breaking as it fell from his slack fingers.

...

Jack was glad that Megan and Brenda were staying asleep so long – for one thing, the Doctor had left the TARDIS in their back garden, and that could be a little hard to explain, now the Retcon had taken effect. Around half past eight in the evening, he let himself into the TARDIS to find it quiet, but he was greeted by a reassuring hum; there was nothing he should be worried about, and the old timeship was clearly keeping a close watch over her occupants.

Jack automatically stretched a hand out to stroke the nearest wall, then quietly padded through the console room and into the corridor beyond.

He checked the medbay first. Alice was asleep on one of the beds. He considered her for a moment, and silently gave thanks that she and the Doctor seemed to have settled their differences. That moment when the Time Lord had tried to remove the time sense from her had been awful to witness, and if it had scared Jack, then it must have been terrifying for Alice. In the space of a day, she'd seen the Doctor at his best, and at his very worst, and frankly, it was a miracle she was still in one piece. She looked much better, too – her face was a healthy colour for the first time, and sleeping soundly and peacefully.

For reasons Jack couldn't begin to fathom, there were two large stones on the bedside cabinet. The medbay was otherwise empty, so Jack left the stones where they were and set off to look for the Doctor.

The TARDIS gave Jack no clues, so it was a while before he tried the library. He almost snorted with laughter when he saw the Doctor sprawled in the armchair, an empty teacup on the floor beside him, and his glasses halfway down his nose. The Time Lord was clearly fast asleep, and was even snoring softly. Jack was glad of it. He didn't know all of what had gone on earlier, but he had managed to gather enough from his brief conversation with the Doctor while he was treating Alice's hand to know that it must have been pretty traumatic not just for her, but for him, too.

Jack was reluctant to wake the Doctor, but they really had to move the TARDIS out of the garden – and ideally into the Hub – before Megan and Brenda woke from their drug-induced sleep. So instead of waking him straight away, Jack went to the galley and made himself a coffee and the Doctor a fresh cup of tea (three sugars, as a treat) before returning to the library and shaking the Doctor gently by the shoulder.

'I've made tea,' Jack offered, as soon as the Doctor's eyes flicked open.

'Ugh,' the Time Lord replied. 'I'm out of practice with controlled telepathy. Headache from hell. But tea is good, thank you.'

'You're welcome,' replied Jack. 'Drink up, and take whatever you need for your headache, because we really need to move the TARDIS.'

'To the Hub?'

'Why not? But mostly away from here. We don't want to invite any questions when the Retcon is still fresh in the bloodstream.'

The Doctor nodded, and gulped his tea down, finding that it eased his headache somewhat ; enough that he went straight to the console room without picking up any painkillers from the medbay. He never really used painkillers anyway, except in emergencies, and there was a perverse part of him that felt he deserved a bit of a headache after the way he'd acted earlier, in the garden.

It took only a few seconds for the TARDIS to dematerialise and then materialise in the Hub.

When they arrived, Gwen was about to set off back to Bute Street.

'They should be waking up any time now,' she explained. 'People are generally very suggestible when they first come round, so I'm off to plant some plausible memories. Do you think Alice would like to come too?'

'I'm sure she would,' Jack replied, 'but she's still in the medbay sleeping off her own close encounter. She can go and see them tomorrow if she wants.'

'But she's OK, isn't she?' Gwen questioned. She hadn't been there to witness most of the afternoon's events, and hadn't realised how close a call it had been.

'She'll be fine,' Jack reassured her. 'Really. Just needs a bit more rest.'

Gwen nodded, and left through the cogwheel door.


	12. Chapter 12

When Alice woke, she was alone. It took several long moments for her to remember where she was, but once her brain had processed the fact that she was on the TARDIS, and in the medbay – and why – she actually found that she felt much better. In fact, she felt fantastic. Even her hand was only aching, rather than actually painful. She sat up carefully, and found that the dizziness had almost passed, too. She swung her feet over the side of the bed, and was about to set off for the door when she felt the tug of the drip. The saline bag was pretty much empty, so presumably the drip had done its job. Frowning slightly, she felt along the bandage until she located the bump which must be the canola, hesitating for a moment, and then pulling it out in one movement. It stung a bit, but she pressed on the site for a couple of minutes, and it soon felt OK.

She carefully hung the canola and tube on the drip stand, and retrieved her hooded top and boots from the chair by the bed, before leaving the medbay to search for the Doctor. The TARDIS seemed to be enormous; it was only after walking down several corridors that she remembered that she was supposedly inside a wooden telephone box, and added that to her list of questions to ask the Doctor when she found him.

She must have tried several dozen doors before she finally emerged into what looked like a control room of some sort, and spotted what seemed to be external doors, in that they also looked to be made of wood. Suddenly feeling unaccountably nervous, she pressed the latch down and opened the door a crack.

Alice smiled in relief. She was back in the underground Torchwood base, and at the click of the door, Gwen, who was working at a terminal nearest where the TARDIS had been parked, turned and smiled.

'Alice! Welcome back,' she said, warmly. 'Ianto's making coffee. Come on up. Jack and the Doctor are in the board room getting ready for the debrief.'

The two women made their way up a large meeting room with a smart screen at one end. The Doctor and Jack seemed pleased to see her, if a little surprised that she was up and about.

'We weren't sure if you'd be up in time for this,' he offered.

'It's more than four hours,' said Alice, hastily, glancing at the Doctor. 'It must be, surely. And I feel fine. Really well, actually.'

'You look much better,' admitted Jack, and the Doctor nodded in agreement, his gaze taking her in and apparently satisfying him that she wasn't about to keel over.

Alice sat down in an empty chair next to the Time Lord, and was slightly surprised when he took her hand – but it turned out that he only wanted to check her pulse. She was embarrassed for a moment, but he was unashamed, and there was something rather nice about people being concerned. He let her hand go with a shrug and a smile.

'Much better,' was his only comment.

When Ianto came in a moment later he had drinks for everyone. Alice couldn't understand how the Doctor could drink his tea with so much sugar and stay so thin, but she managed to stop herself from commenting, hoping that the Doctor wouldn't be able to read her thoughts if they weren't actually in physical contact.

The debrief session was fairly short, as it turned out. The Doctor and Jack between them talked through the scientific explanation for the Megan's disappearance and subsequent reappearance. Gwen looked suitably horrified when they reached the part where Alice had gone into the rift after her. So horrified, that Alice almost felt she ought to apologise to her.

Gwen took over, briefing everyone on the cover story that had been given to the Police, and which had been suggested to Brenda and Megan while they'd still been drowsy from the Retcon. Alice didn't know what to think about the routine way in which Torchwood seemed to wipe people's memories. But in this case it was certainly better than the alternative. Mostly, Alice felt even more relieved and privileged that it looked like she was going to emerge from this bizarre day with all her own memories and mind not only intact but enhanced.

Alice's thoughts were wandering by the end of the debrief, and she found that she was already getting tired, suggesting that she wasn't quite as much better as she'd thought. She was shaken out of her thoughts by Jack clapping his hands together and loudly saying 'Pizzas!'

Now that food had been mentioned, Alice realised quite how hungry she was, and that she was more hungry than she was tired.

'Is it late?' she asked.

'That's lesson two,' smirked the Doctor. Don't try now, you're exhausted, and still not completely well, but tomorrow we can start working on your awareness of the passing of time.'

'I tried that a bit this afternoon,' Alice admitted. 'I felt the world spinning on its axis, and the orbit round the sun, and when I started to become aware of the movement of the galaxies around each other, I fell over.'

The Doctor's eyes lit up with amusement.

'I'm not surprised,' he commented. 'Like I said before, we'll start with something simple, not with the whole movement of the universe.' He was still smirking, and Alice rolled her eyes.

'I'd love to do lesson two tomorrow,' she said, 'but before we do, I ought to go and see Megan and Brenda, to check how they are.'

'That would probably be good, actually,' Jack offered. 'Brenda knows you from before the missing memories, so if you give her the same cover story that we agreed, it will help cement it in her mind, and hopefully mean that the two of them can have a smoother transition back into normal life.'

Alice nodded. That made sense. She felt torn about the prospect of lying to the woman who had become a friend, but again, it was better than the alternative.

Alice looked behind her up at the clock. It was late – almost midnight, in fact. Too late to text Jenny to say she'd be late in. But then again, Jenny probably wouldn't worry, and Alice wasn't sure when she'd be back in any case.

It wasn't long before copious amounts of pizza arrived, and Alice happily set about eating. It was hard to believe that this whole incredible episode had all taken place within a day. She felt like the world was a bigger place now than it had been only that morning. Nothing would be the same again.

She took a large swig of her diet coke, and then stopped suddenly, with a horrible thought.

'You haven't put Retcon in my drink, have you?'

There was a second's pause, during which Alice convinced herself that they had.

'Actually, I was thinking about it,' Jack admitted. 'But he wouldn't let me.' He elbowed the Doctor in the ribs and turned towards him.

'Oi!' he exclaimed, rubbing his side in mock-hurt. 'I told you, she's with me. I'm not leaving her here in your questionable clutches, Captain,' he retorted, but with a grin.

'So you're going to travel with the Doctor?' Jack asked, and it almost seemed as if there might be something behind the words; an emotion that Alice couldn't immediately place, but which might have been regret, or even envy.

'For as long as he'll put up with me,' Alice confirmed. 'He doesn't trust me not to be irresponsible with my time sense, so he's going to train me up.'

Jack raised his eyebrows. 'So, Doc, can we have her back here in Torchwood when you've taught her everything you know?' He turned to Alice. 'Seriously, there's a job for you here if you want it when you decide to put some roots down.'

'But you don't know anything about me!' Alice objected.

Gwen and Jack just laughed, and Ianto raised both eyebrows.

'You're kidding, right?' the young Welshman said. 'I've had hours today find out everything about you.'

He proceeded to rattle off three minutes' worth of personal information, starting with Alice's full name and date of birth, then ranging from her A level results to the name of her parents' cat. She stared, open mouthed, not knowing whether to be impressed or horrified, and he kept his eyes on her, as if in challenge. She did the only thing she could do, and laughed. And once she'd started laughing, she just couldn't stop. It was a couple of minutes before she was able to explain what exactly was so funny.

Between giggles, she managed to explain: 'This has been the single most freaky day of my whole life. I've been inside a temporal anomaly, been burned by a rift-dwelling alien, contracted and recovered from blood poisoning, found out about a secret alien-hunting organisation, met a Time Lord, and spent quite a long time in a box that's bigger on the inside than on the outside. And you expect me to be shocked because you know my GCSE results and my embarrassing middle name?'

Put like that, it was quite funny. Luckily, there was still plenty of pizza, because nobody seemed to want to turn in for the night just yet.


	13. Chapter 13

When Alice woke the following morning it took her a good few moments to remember where she was, and a few more to convince herself that her memory of the previous day was real. The bandage on her hand was a useful indication that it was, but it still seemed too extraordinary.

After the celebratory late-night pizza, Alice hadn't even thought about getting home – it turned out that the Torchwood Hub had a couple of guest rooms, and she'd crashed out in one of these (at Gwen's suggestion).

Alice felt groggy as she stretched and finally sat up. Her hand ached a bit, and there was a background fuzziness in her head that was infinitely better than the last three months' headaches, but still make her feel sluggish. Thinking that a shower and breakfast would help, Alice glanced at her watch, and was surprised to see that it was almost 11 o'clock – she had been asleep for nine hours.

There were showers as well, it turned out. It was awkward trying to wash her hair without getting the bandage wet, and she knew she would feel grungy again having to put on yesterday's clothes, but the water was hot and relieved some of her fuzzy headedness. It was a very welcome surprise when she got back to the bedroom to find a pile of clean clothes and a note from Gwen saying she was welcome to borrow them.

When she had dried and dressed in Gwen's clothes, she set off to see whether Torchwood also had a kitchen where she could get some breakfast, or whether people here just survived on coffee and takeaways. The bedroom was right at the end of a long corridor, and it took her a few minutes to work her way through the labyrinth of tunnels to the main area of the Hub.

Everyone else looked like they had been up for hours, and Alice suddenly felt extremely lazy. Jack and the Doctor were giving their attention to what looked to be a piece of scrap metal. The Doctor had his geeky glasses on again and was murmuring comments, while Jack was standing with his arms folded as if to say, 'go on then, impress me.' Gwen was at a workstation staring at a rotating model of a purple 3D shape on her computer screen, which could have been an alien artefact but could just as easily have been a screensaver. Ianto was counting some star-shaped green metallic objects into piles of 10 and sealing them in plastic bags, which, Alice noticed as she peered over his shoulder, he then labelled with the day's date and the word 'Mandrax'.

Alice was still wondering which of them it would be best to disturb, when Ianto turned round and smiled at her.

'You prefer tea, don't you?'

'Um. Yes, thanks,' Alice replied. 'Is there a kettle somewhere?'

'I'll make it. I'm just about finished here anyway,' Ianto offered. He completed the final label before loading all the full bags back into their box, and placing the box on a trolley by his desk. Alice followed him as he got up and made his way round past the stairs to the board room and into a small but well appointed kitchen. He flicked the kettle on, and in the cupboard he opened there were three sizes of tea pot, and a jar of genuine leaf tea.

'Everyone here drinks coffee,' Ianto explained, 'but that doesn't mean we should skimp on the quality of the tea we offer guests. The Doctor drinks tea, too, and Jack insists that we keep a stock of his favourite here for when he visits. We always keep a supply of Jaffa cakes here for the same reason,' he added, indicating a stack of them. 'Nobody else is allowed to eat them.'

Alice laughed. 'Do you think he'd mind if I had one with my tea?'

'Only if you take the rest of the packet and a mug of tea back for him,' replied the Welshman, with a smirk.

Five Jaffa cakes and two cups of tea didn't perhaps constitute the healthiest breakfast that Alice had ever had, but she consoled herself with the thought that the Doctor had eaten the other seven and then looked sadly at the empty plate.

'I was thinking that I ought to go and see Brenda and Megan,' Alice began. 'I was going to say I'd go this morning, but there's not much of that left,' she smiled, ruefully.

'Now would be good, actually,' Jack admitted. 'They will still have some of the residual effects of the Retcon in their bloodstream, so anything you can do to help cement the fake explanation we concocted for Megan's disappearance and reappearance would be great.'

'OK,' Alice agreed. 'Er, how do I get out?'

Given the options, Alice opted to follow Ianto out through the less scenic tourist information centre route. Before she left, Jack handed her a slip of paper with a number neatly printed on it.

'That's my direct line,' he explained. 'If anything goes wrong during your time with Megan and Brenda, if the false memory doesn't seem to be holding, just call me. Anything like that, the sooner we can fix it, the better.' Alice nodded, and set off.

The sun was bright, and Alice felt more alive than she had ever done. The world around her had a depth and complexity and beauty that was palpable to her time sense even without consciously engaging it. Life was good, for a change, and as she walked towards Bute Street she knew why people talked about having a spring in their step.

She was only half way there when something very odd caught her attention. Admittedly, the last twenty four hours had tested to the limit and beyond what Alice would previously have defined as 'odd', but this really did feel all wrong. In a bus shelter across the road, a group of three slightly greasy-looking teenage boys were hunched over something, and laughing. But that wasn't odd. What was odd was that a few feet away from them there was a cat which had simply stopped, as if frozen, and all around it was a sort of pulsing halo that simply felt abhorrent to Alice's nascent time sense.

She blinked, and took a step back, almost tripping over a kerb round someone's front garden. The boys were so intent on whatever it is they were holding that they didn't know they were observed. Suddenly, the cat moved, taking one step then staggering slightly, before shaking itself and scampering unsteadily away towards an alleyway. The boys laughed again.

Alice kept watching. The boys were turning round now, looking down the alleyway, but apparently not being bothered enough to follow the cat down there. Suddenly, one of them pointed, and quickly they hunched over the object again, as a pigeon strutted close by them. And stopped. Exactly like the cat, it seemed frozen, and surrounded by the same strange halo of time distortion. As the boys laughed again, Alice felt more and more uneasy, and found herself reaching for her phone and the number that Jack had given her.

She was halfway through dialling when the boys looked up expectantly, as they had done with the cat, but the pigeon didn't fly away, or even walk off. It disappeared, leaving behind it a trace of something, like a small pigeon sized hole in the fabric of time, which quickly knitted itself back together as Alice watched.

The boys kept staring at the empty pavement, as if they expected the bird to reappear. Eventually they seemed to get a bit spooked, and the tallest of them pocketed whatever it was they had been using, and all three walked off down the street, trying not to look shifty, and failing miserably.

Alice finished dialling the number, and Jack answered on the second ring.

'Everything alright?' he asked, concerned.

'I'm not sure,' replied Alice. 'I'm not at the house yet. There's something weird happening. It's hard to explain,' she sighed. 'Some boys at the bus shelter had some kind of machine, and they made a pigeon disappear, and they froze a cat.'

'You want me to call the RSPCA?' Jack asked, a smile in his voice.

'No, I mean they froze the cat in time. It's like they just stopped it. Really, it was like pressing pause on a DVD.'

Alice clearly heard Jack's intake of breath.

'Are they still there?' he asked urgently.

'No, they're walking down towards Bute Street, but I can still see them,' Alice offered.

'Don't let them out of your sight,' Jack ordered. 'Follow them, but keep your distance. Don't go within 25 yards of that thing they're using. Please. Really don't.'

He sounded so serious that Alice readily agreed, and set off following the trio at what should be a safe distance.

'The Doctor and I are on our way,' Jack advised. 'We'll track your phone to find you. Just keep them in sight, but don't approach them whatever you do.'

There was a click and the line went dead. Alice internally shrugged and kept walking. Brenda and Megan would obviously have to wait


	14. Chapter 14

The three teenagers kept walking up Bute Street, away from the Bay. They were obviously deep in conversation with each other, speaking in hushed tones and with their heads together and shoulders jostling, so that it looked very much as if they were plotting something. Alice remembered again how concerned Jack had sounded on the phone when she had described what she'd seen. Whatever the boys were plotting probably wasn't good.

The Doctor and Jack must have run from the hub; they caught up with Alice just as she passed the Salvation Army hostel. She pointed out their quarry, and the Doctor immediately took out what Alice now knew to be his sonic screwdriver, and surreptitiously aimed it at them for a few seconds, then examined the device with growing concern.

'Are you going to tell me what that thing is that they've got?' Alice asked, in a whisper.

'You weren't far wrong when you said it was like they'd pressed the pause button,' Jack replied, grimly. 'That's what we used to call these things when I was in the Time Agency.'

'The what?'

'Long story, for another time,' cut in the Doctor. 'I know the Time Agency trialled these things, but refused to deploy them as standard equipment because they were just too unreliable.'

'And for the Time Agency to find something too risky, you know it must be bad,' Jack added, with a slightly forced smile.

'So what does it actually do?' Alice asked, as they kept walking.

'It uses a narrow-focus beam of partially decayed artron radiation effectively to pause time around a target object,' the Doctor explained. 'The bigger the control unit, the wider the range, and the bigger the target object can be.'

'This one looks average – and that's big enough,' Jack added. 'Under normal circumstances, that would give a range of about 20 yards, and a target object about size of a small child. But there's no guarantee that normal rules apply here.'

'The rift!' Alice exclaimed.

'Exactly,' replied the Doctor. Add the rift into the mix, and not only can we expect a much greater range and potential target size, but the whole process will be even more unstable and unpredictable than usual.'

Alice thought back to what she'd seen them do before. 'So when they used it on the pigeon, and it disappeared, that wasn't supposed to happen, was it?'

'Nope. That was probably the interaction with the rift, taking the poor bird out of time and possibly regurgitating it somewhere else.' the Doctor said, darkly.

'Or possibly,' Alice said, with dawning realisation, 'leaving it stuck, phased, just like Megan?'

Jack sighed and closed his eyes briefly. 'I was hoping you wouldn't work that out. But yes, as soon as you rang and told us what you'd seen, I was pretty sure that there was a connection.'

'But that means that they've had the device for a whole week, doesn't it? Megan went missing 8 days ago!' Alice exclaimed.

Jack's response was to touch his earpiece, and give some brief instructions to Gwen back at the Hub to compile a list of any and all reports of unexplained missing people, pets, and even objects over the last fortnight. There would potentially be a huge clear-up operation from this, Jack knew. And unlike with Megan, there was no guarantee that they'd ever be able to locate and restore everyone affected.

Concentrating on the explanations, they almost missed it when the three boys suddenly turned off Bute Street and headed right down an alleyway. Jack motioned that Alice and the Doctor should stay back while they waited until they could follow without being noticed. By the time they entered the alleyway, the boys were through it and scrambling down a grassy bank beyond.

Jack and Alice looked at each other. 'That's the railway embankment,' Jack realised.

'Let's hope they've only gone there because of all the wild rabbits,' muttered Alice, but without much hope. They all had the sinking feeling that they knew exactly why the three boys were taking their alien device to this precise location, and they needed to be stopped before they tried it out on the next passing train.

Alice turned to look at Jack again, and was shocked to see a gun in his hand. The Doctor didn't seem to like that much, either, and took Alice's hand to pull her to the side.

The boys clearly didn't know they weren't alone, and were settling themselves down in the grass about half way down the embankment, laughing excitedly and pointing at the track.

There was a soft click. Jack had raised the gun to point at the group.

'Put your hands in the air, then slowly stand up and turn around,' he called, calmly and with authority.

Only one of them raised his hands; the other two scrabbled to stand up, but when they glanced around and saw the gun, the taller boy clutched the device protectively, and started fumbling with the control pads on the side. The other boys backed away realising they were in over their heads.

There was a moment of hiatus, then all hell broke loose.

Alice and the boy saw the approaching train at the same moment. He spun on the spot and pointed the device at it, while Alice shouted and dived forward, hoping to knock his aim off true. At the same moment there was an ear-splitting crack as Jack fired a single shot right at the device.

Time splintered. The bullet impacted and blew the metallic casing into sharp fragments, flooding the area with artron radiation – invisible to the teenage boy, who now cradled his hand where the shrapnel had cut the skin, but all too apparent to Alice.

The bullet hung for a moment, in the epicentre of the explosion, suspended in mid-air in its artron halo, as the momentum from Alice's wild leap carried her along.

Then, with a horrible sucking sound, and a feeling like being turned inside out, the ugly wound in the fabric of time sealed itself.

And the bullet, freed from its temporal prison, resumed its inexorable and deadly journey.

The scream died in Alice's throat as the bullet tore into her shoulder, and she landed heavily and awkwardly, scrabbling at the rough grass with her still-bandaged right hand, trying to stop herself rolling down the embankment onto the rails below. Every bump as she rolled was agony, and she quickly just closed her eyes and tried to curl herself up into a foetal position, pressing her bandaged hand against the injured shoulder as if by doing so she could somehow stop the blinding pain.

'Shit!' Jack holstered his gun and barged past the hapless teenager – his friends were already far away – to reach Alice. The Doctor beat him to it, managing to control his run down the uneven slope and get himself just below the tumbling body.

Alice was only vaguely aware that she had stopped moving, and that there was someone standing over her. Her hand was removed from her shoulder, and she saw that it was stained red, but nothing made sense any more. She blinked, and Jack's anguished face swam into view. She tried to smile at him reassuringly, but wasn't sure if it had worked, as he didn't seem to be smiling back.

'Calm down, Jack.' That was the Doctor's voice, and it came from somewhere behind Alice's head.

'Now, give me your vortex manipulator, and hold this against the wound to slow the bleeding. I'll be back in less than a minute.'

Somewhere in the grey distance Alice thought she heard the whine of the sonic, then a whooshing noise like air being sucked into a vacuum. Everything was fading in and out, and all she could really be sure of was the pain in her shoulder.

Jack grasped a handful of the hood from Alice's top, and pressed it as hard as he dared into her shoulder. He was reassured when this elicited a moan of pain, and then let out the breath he'd been holding when the familiar wheeze of the TARDIS heralded the Doctor's return.


	15. Chapter 15

A/N – sorry for the duplicated chapter. Here's the real chapter 15. Enjoy!

Jack gathered Alice carefully in his arms, and made his way as smoothly as he could back up the embankment. The Doctor had managed to find a flat area of grass just big enough to materialise the TARDIS. By the time Jack reached the time ship, the doors were open and the Doctor was standing aside to let them through. He led Jack straight through the console room to the medbay, and Jack gently laid Alice down on the nearest bed. She was now clearly unconscious, the Doctor was quick to check her pulse, breathing and pupil reaction.

'Heart rate is up, blood pressure is down,' he commented. 'She's gone into shock.'

He quickly set up a drip stand with a bag of saline, and then cut along the sleeve of Alice's borrowed top from cuff to neck, so that he could insert the canola and then start to examine the wound properly.

'Do something useful,' the Doctor said, quietly, glancing up at Jack as he stood by the bed, hands on hips and radiating guilt and concern. 'I need three shots of morphine. Third cupboard from the left, second shelf up. Make sure they're the green ones, marked for humans.'

Jack moved, glad to be helpful. At the Doctor's nod, he discharged the first of the painkilling hyposprays into Alice's neck. In the mean time, the Doctor had cleaned most of the blood from around the wound, and was examining it with a handheld scanner of some sort.

'The bullet's still in there,' he commented, 'but not for long. You're still using that Webley?'

Jack nodded. It was a nightmare getting ammunition for his favoured weapon.

'OK, then this should work.' The Doctor grabbed another device from the counter, and held it close to the wound. Concentrating, he very slowly squeezed the trigger on the side. He shifted the angle of the device twice more before he seemed satisfied, and pressed a green button at the foot of the trigger. Then, he slowly started squeezing it again, and this time, the flesh of Alice's shoulder parted and the bullet emerged, rising up until it clicked onto the end of the device.

The Doctor straightened up, released the green button and caught the pellet as it fell into his outstretched hand.

'Yours, I believe?' he asked Jack, with a raised eyebrow.

'Don't. Just don't,' Jack replied. 'You can give me an earful later when you've finished making sure she'll be OK.'

The Doctor nodded in understanding. The bullet clinked into a metallic dish on the counter, and he returned his attention back to Alice's shoulder, this time using a tissue regenerator to help knit the damaged flesh back together.

'What's the score? How's she doing?' Jack asked eventually, unable to bear the silence any longer.

'She's been shot. How do you think she is doing?' the Doctor retorted, then seemed to relent.

'There's a significant amount of tissue damage, and a chipped bone, but remarkably no real damage to the main nerves, and I've repaired the tears in the most important blood vessels already. She's lost a lot of blood. But then you know that, because you seem to be wearing most of it,' the Doctor commented, gesturing with his eyes at the dark red stain on Jack's coat.

'Doctor?' Jack pleaded, removing the offending coat, and handing in over the back of a chair.

'She is going to be fine,' the Doctor admitted. 'And, for the record, I do know that it was an accident.'

Jack looked down at the floor, relieved beyond words both that Alice was going to recover, and that he might even be forgiven by the one man in the universe that he really looked up to.

'Keep an eye on her,' the Doctor instructed, and left for the console room to take them back to the Torchwood Hub.

By the time he exited the TARDIS, Jack's professional persona as firmly back in place. Gwen and Ianto were waiting expectantly, and he was quick to issue the necessary orders.

'Gwen, we need an ID on the three youths. The tallest one will have a hand injury that needs looking at. Find them, and get from them as much as you can about what they've been doing with the pause button, then Retcon their arses back to a fortnight ago, or just before whenever it was they got hold of it.'

Gwen nodded and turned to the nearest workstation.

'Ianto, finish Gwen's list of disappearances, priorities people, and correlate it with the information she's going to give you from the idiots who've been messing with this thing.'

'Jack, where's Alice and the Doctor?' Ianto finally interrupted.

'In the TARDIS. Alice was injured, but she's going to be fine,' was all Jack said.

There was a look on his face that Ianto couldn't quite place, but he sensed that now was not the time to ask; a closer cross-examination could wait.

The Doctor stayed inside the TARDIS all afternoon. Feeling responsible, anxious and useless, Jack eventually made a cup of strong sugary tea for the Doctor, and took it into the TARDIS. The time ship hummed a welcome as he walked through the console room.

'Thanks, Old Girl,' he murmured, absently stroking his hand down one of the coral struts. 'If you've forgiven me, then maybe he has too, eh?'

At the open door of the medbay, Jack paused. He'd braced himself for the scene to be much as he left it, but instead, the blood had all been mopped up, and the Doctor was sitting on a stool by the side of Alice's bed. Alice herself was sitting up, leaning against a pile of cushions, and the two of them were laughing over some sort of board game.

A whole range of emotions bubbled up: relief, but also a bit of jealousy, irritation that he'd spent an afternoon torturing himself with anxiety when all was in fact well. It took only a few seconds for relief to win.

'I should have brought two cups of tea,' was his only comment as he entered the medbay and handed the Doctor the drink. 'Would you like something, Alice?'

'Tea would be lovely if you're offering,' Alice replied.

It wasn't lost on Jack that she didn't quite meet his eye. He made his way to the TARDIS's galley kitchen and took his time making a second cup of tea, and a coffee for himself.

When he got back, the Doctor had put the game to one side.

'I've got a present for you,' the Time Lord offered, looking up.

Jack merely raised a questioning eyebrow, and the Doctor nodded his head towards Jack's coat, which was now folded on the end of the bed.

Jack took it, and held it up, confused for a moment as to what he was supposed to be looking for. Then it clicked. The blood stain had completely gone.

'Thanks, Doc. Is there no limit to what you can do with your sonic screwdriver?'

'Actually it was Alice that did it, once I'd showed her the right setting,' the Doctor supplied.

'Um, it's my way of saying sorry,' Alice mumbled.

'Your're sorry?' Jack exclaimed, incredulous.

'I know it wasn't your fault,' Alice explained. 'It wasn't really anyone's fault, but it was more mine than anyone else's. I took a stupid risk. Again.' She glanced sideways at the Doctor. They had clearly had another little discussion about this.

'Alice, if you can forgive me, then I'm sure I can forgive you,' Jack replied, with a relieved smile. 'For what it's worth, today was a freak set of circumstances. The bullet could have ricocheted anywhere, and it was only bad luck that you were hit, and good luck that you weren't more badly hurt.'

'I understand that,' Alice replied, 'and I know you do, too, but I'm not completely insensitive. I know that it must have been horrible for you.'

Jack found himself almost lost for words. The Doctor had found himself an unusual new companion this time, it seemed.

'I'm just glad you're OK,' he said, eventually. 'When you're well enough to get out of bed and come out to the Hub, we'll have a proper debrief, and I'll make sure there's cakes all round.'

With that, he left them to it, and when he emerged from the TARDIS again, he felt like a weight had been lifted. He analysed the feeling, and realised it wasn't just relief that there would be no serious repercussions from the day's events, but also that the Doctor and Alice already seemed so right together. Even though they'd only met the day before, and had lurched from crisis to crisis over the last 30 hours. Jack smiled, and allowed himself to be pleased on behalf of his Time Lord friend. He had been lonely too long.


	16. Chapter 16

Alice and the Doctor emerged from the TARDIS just after eight o'clock in the evening. Alice looked a little pale, and had her arm in a sling, but otherwise seemed well. She had found something reasonably normal to wear from the time ship's copious wardrobes.

'Does that mean it's dinner time, then?' Jack asked them, with a raised eyebrow.

Gwen got up from her workstation and stretched, cracking the joints in her shoulders.

'It's a little late for cake. Shall I phone for pizzas?' she suggested.

'Actually, Alice and I ate in the TARDIS, but you go ahead,' the Doctor replied. 'Alice, why don't you sit down and chat while they eat – I want to have a look at what Gwen and Ianto have found out. We might have a lot to do tomorrow, and I want to make it as safe as possible.'

With that, he settled himself at the work station that Gwen had recently vacated. Glasses on, he peered at the screen for a moment, then cracked his knuckles and started scrolling through data and articles at a rate that would have made Alice dizzy if she'd not looked away.

'What's that you've got?' Ianto asked, gesturing to the battered old box that she had tucked under her good arm.

'Oh! It's my new favourite game – the Doctor was teaching me how to play it when I was stuck in the medbay, to stop me trying to get up. I thought we might play again this evening, but it looks as if he's going to be busy.'

'I'm sure one of us could play,' Jack put in. 'We do need a break, I think.'

'Um, actually I'm not sure if you can,' said Alice, awkwardly. 'It's a Time Lord game. The strategy's easy enough to pick up, but I'm not sure you'll be able to tell which piece is which.'

She opened the box to reveal a folding board made of red-coloured fine grain wood, and with a series of indents carved into it. There was also a large bag of what looked like identical wooden pellets.

'It's sort of like a cross between happy families and backgammon,' Alice explained, realising even as she said it that that probably wasn't a helpful image. 'Each of the beads has different temporal properties – they're all different ages, for one thing, and some of them are were made from living trees, others from dead wood, and these ones – she pointed to a couple of the beads which, to everyone else, looked just the same as the others – have crossed their own time lines, so they can be played like a joker. It's a strategy game, you have to arrange them in a specific pattern, playing against each other.'

She looked up hopefully. Ianto looked bemused, and Jack laughed. 'You and the Doc are on your own there, I think,' he admitted.

'Yeah, you're probably right,' Alice laughed back, and put the game to one side. 'It's really a Gallifreyan children's game – it's supposed to be a way of teaching them to read time lines without having to do it on people, which would be a bit impolite.'

'So, you know a bit about interpreting time lines now, do you?' Jack asked as they sat down round on the sofas in the lounge area and waited for the pizzas to arrive. There was a curious look in his eyes, and Alice looked down.

'Just a little bit, and for what it's worth,' she added, raising her eyes to look at Jack again, 'I know why you feel different now, but it doesn't affect me like it affects the Doctor, because I don't have all the cultural baggage and expectations that would usually go with having time sensitivity. I mean, you don't feel wrong to me now, you just feel, um, different. If that makes sense.'

Jack had to smile at her awkwardness. 'It's OK, Alice. Really. I'm a fixed point in time, which is more than a little different, but I've had several centuries to get used to it.'

'Blimey. Centuries. But the Doctor's even older.'

'He claims to be 900 or so, but I'm not so sure,' said Jack, with a wink.

'Oh, he's much older than that!' Alice exclaimed. 'If he says he's 900 he's flattering himself by using Gallifreyan years, which are much longer than ours, and he's counting linear time, rather than his own personal time line – he must be nearer 3000!'

'Oi! I can hear you,' came the Doctor's muffled voice from the other side of the Hub. 'If you were 3000 years old, wouldn't you fib a little bit about your age?'

'Sorry!' called Alice, but without any real remorse. How had her life suddenly got so strange that this kind of conversation was something she could take in her stride?

'But think about for how much of those 3000 years he's been the only Time Lord left,' Jack said quietly.

'What?' Alice asked. 'What do you mean, the only one?'

'He hasn't told you? Then I won't tell you much. Only that there was a war. The Time War, between the Doctor's race and the Daleks – remember them?' Alice nodded. 'Everyone died. All the Time Lords. Except him.' Jack nodded at the Doctor. 'None of us really knows what he went through during the war, but the Time Lords were telepathic, and with them gone, he's never been able to fill that gap in his psyche.'

'I'd no idea,' Alice admitted. 'No wonder he was excited about me having time sensitivity. But it must be awful for him too. I mean, I can do the time stuff, but I'm not telepathic. I can't give him that back.' She looked stricken, and Jack reached out to grasp her hand briefly.

'You can't take on the burden of his loneliness, Alice. But you can do what the rest of us do: be there with him, share something of your life with him, make his time with you a time when he's a little less lonely.'

Alice nodded, processing what she'd just been told. She was saved from further introspection by the arrival of Gwen with the pizzas, but rather than sit with the rest of them, she wandered over to where the Doctor was still sitting in front of the computer terminal.

'Hi,' she said, softly, standing behind him and leaning over his shoulder. 'What news?'

'Well, we can cross off one of the people who have been reported missing straight away,' replied the Doctor, with a small smile. He indicated the screen, and Alice saw her own name and photograph.

'Oh no!' she gasped, mortified. 'Was it Jenny that reported me missing?'

'Yep,' said the Doctor, obviously amused. 'Shall I let her know you've been found safe and well? I could pretend to be the police.'

'Actually, I've already done that, while I was waiting for the pizzas to arrive,' Gwen called over, obviously having overheard their conversation. The Doctor almost looked disappointed that he wouldn't have the chance to impersonate the police himself. Gwen continued, 'I said you'd had a bit of an accident, but you were fine, and she'd be able to see you tomorrow.'

'Thanks,' Alice breathed, still beyond embarrassed at the worry she'd caused.

'To be fair, Alice,' Gwen added, 'technically you are missing. I mean, nobody knows you're here, do they? And technically, you did sort of have an accident.' She looked meaningfully at Alice's still-bandaged shoulder and hand. 'Wouldn't you say that your friend was right to be worried?'

'I suppose...' Alice admitted. 'I'll send her a text to let her know I'll come round tomorrow.'

She patted her pockets for her mobile, but of course it wasn't there.

'Ah, yes,' the Doctor began. 'I'm afraid your phone met something of a sticky end. It had already got one dose of rift energy yesterday, but it was fine until today when it got flooded with decayed artron energy, and it sort of melted inside. I couldn't mend it.'

He looked genuinely apologetic, but as far as Alice was concerned he had nothing to be sorry for. 'You were too busy mending me, I think,' she replied, with a smile, and leant back down to look at the screen.

The Doctor scrolled down, and showed Alice some more files. Gwen and Ianto had been meticulous in the way that they'd correlated the activity of the alien pause button device with the reports of missing people and pets, and it looked as if there were four that needed following up. Megan was already being dealt with. Then there were three more missing people – a 45 year old factory worker, a secretary, and a homeless man – as well as a handful of cats and dogs.

'And you think these people are all stuck in the rift, like Megan was?' Alice queried.

'It's impossible to say at this stage,' the Doctor admitted. 'Some of them might just be gone. We'll have to get Gwen to do some old fashioned police work to try and find likely locations where the missing people might be, then scan the areas for unusual temporal signatures.'

'I can do that,' Alice offered. 'I found Megan, didn't I?'

'You did,' the Doctor conceded, 'but you're not going out first thing tomorrow to do field work for Torchwood when really you ought still to be resting. You lost an awful lot of blood today, and I'm not quite sure why I've let out of the TARDIS medbay yet. You do realise that you're only feeling OK at the moment because of the painkillers and the adrenaline?'

'OK, I'll be good,' Alice agreed. She did feel rather tired and still pretty sore, after all, even with whatever drugs the Doctor had given her earlier.

The Doctor merely raised his eyebrows, and stood up from the terminal. The two of them headed back to where the others were finishing their pizzas. Tonight they would formulate a plan, and in the morning, they had three missing people to try and return to their families.


	17. Chapter 17

Alice slept in the Hub again that night. She had apologised profusely for ruining the clothes she had borrowed from Gwen, but the Welsh woman had replied that her clothes got shot at all the time, and it was a nice chance not to be wearing them at the time. She had also thanked Ianto profusely for arranging to get her own clothes laundered. She hadn't been sure who to thank for the night shirt that she had found under her pillow, but when she looked at the label it had a large letter T and the word 'morgue' stamped on it, so she decided it was better not to ask.

She woke up the following morning having slept badly. Her hand ached from the burn she'd got from the rift-creature, and her shoulder ached from the partially healed gunshot wound, and she hadn't really been able to get comfortable. A dozen times in the night she'd been tempted to go to the TARDIS and ask the Doctor for another painkiller, but it felt like admitting defeat. By the time she'd struggled into her clothes, trying not to jar the shoulder wound, and replaced the sling, she was almost glad that she was going to be prevented from helping with the rescue operation for the remaining missing people. She wasn't sure she felt up to doing much at all. Reflecting back, she supposed that the Doctor had been right: a lot of her energy yesterday had been adrenaline-fuelled, and she was now paying the price for the last two days' excitement.

Yawning, she trudged into the main area of the hub, and had to think for a moment before remembering where the kitchen was.

'Morning Alice. Tea?' Ianto seemed to have just come from Jack's office, and had two empty mugs in his hand.

'Thanks,' Alice replied, gratefully. 'I haven't really woken up yet this morning.' She followed Ianto into the little kitchen and enjoyed being mesmerised by the practised ease with which he made what she knew would be another perfect pot of tea.

'Then maybe you should go back to bed?' the Welshman suggested. 'You were shot yesterday, after all, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a lie in.'

'I can't get comfortable, to be honest,' Alice admitted. 'Can you pour two cups, and I'll take one into the TARDIS for the Doctor, and ask him for another painkiller at the same time.'

'I don't think you can carry two cups,' Ianto pointed out, looking meaningfully at the bandaged hand and the sling. 'I'll carry the tea.'

He put the tea pot, two cups, the milk and sugar on a tray, and indicated for Alice to follow him out of the kitchen.

When Alice knocked on the TARDIS door there was a muffled 'Come in!' and the door clicked open. Shrugging, Alice pushed the door open and she and Ianto went inside. Alice almost didn't spot the feet sticking out from behind the central console – they were the only part of the Doctor that was visible at all.

'We brought tea,' Alice offered, peering round the console.

'Brilliant! Tea is good,' the Doctor exclaimed. There was a dull thud and what sounded like it was probably a swear word in some language that Alice couldn't understand, and the Doctor emerged, rubbing his elbow ruefully.

'Tea!' he repeated, brightening up, then, as if seeing Alice for the first time, peered at her critically. 'Tea, then a trip to the medbay,' he clarified. 'I want to check your hand and your shoulder, and why on earth didn't you ask me for another painkiller?'

Alice felt silly for deciding to suffer all night, and settled for just drinking her tea. The Doctor helped himself to milk and two sugars, and did the same. Ianto excused himself to go and make coffee for everyone else.

'Come on, you can drink your tea on the way,' the Doctor instructed, and Alice obediently followed him through to the medbay, and at his invitation, sat down on one of the beds.

'Let's look at the hand first,' he said, and held her elbow gently while he unwrapped the layers of gauze. She winced as the last layer came off; the exposed wound still looked nasty. The Doctor straightened each of her fingers in turn, which pulled at the wound and made Alice hiss in pain.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I should have done this yesterday, but we got a bit sidetracked. I needed to make sure there's no nerve damage before I use the dermal regenerator.'

Seemingly satisfied, the Doctor fetched a hand held device and held Alice's finger's straight, he started to pass it slowly from side to side across the ugly raw mark. Alice was fascinated. It still hurt, but she could see and feel the flesh knitting itself back together. In truth, the sensation made her feel slightly nauseous, but it was more intriguing than it was revolting, so she kept watching.

It took about five minutes for the dermal regenerator to do its work. When the Doctor redressed what was left of the wound, it was in a much smaller bandage, only covering Alice's hand and fingers, much to her relief. And it really did feel a lot better.

'I have to check the shoulder now, I'm afraid,' the Doctor said, carefully slipping the sling off and indicating that Alice should undo the zip on her top. 'If I may?' he pulled the sleeve down and eased her arm out of it so that he could get a clear view of the shoulder itself. 'It might be better if you lie down, actually,' he suggested. 'I don't want to give you anything more for the pain until I've checked again for nerve damage, and it might be quite sore.'

Alice nodded, and settled herself back on the bed. 'It really did feel sore in the night,' she admitted. 'I so nearly came and asked for another painkiller.'

'You should have done,' was the Doctor's reply. 'And I'm sorry I didn't offer you one. Right, this might hurt, but I want to check your range of movement.'

Very slowly he raised and rotated Alice's arm. There was one moment when it was painful enough to make Alice gasp and blink back a tear, but for the most part the arm seemed to be able to move normally. The Doctor checked that she had all the sensation in her arm, hand and fingers, and again, all was well, much to Alice's relief. When it came to the wound itself, the Doctor gently removed the dressing and used a hand held scanner to bring up an image on the screen by the bed.

'That's where the bullet met your collar bone,' he pointed, and Alice could just about make out what might have been a small mark. 'And here is the area where the muscle was torn right through – you can see the swelling and scar tissue,' he went on, obviously having realised that Alice was one of those people who preferred to see the details than look away. And it was amazing to see the inside of her own shoulder in such a clear, three-dimensional image. If she'd needed any more convincing that the Doctor wasn't from earth, the medical technology that he had at his disposal would have done the trick.

'Anyway, that all looks good,' the Doctor concluded. 'It will be sore for a few days, but now we know there's no nerve damage, I can give you one of these.' He brandished a small transparent tube with a green label on it, and, unscrewing the end, pressed it to her upper arm. It hissed briefly, and almost straight away Alice felt the general achiness disappear, and the pain in her hand and shoulder fade to almost nothing.

'That's much better!' she smiled. 'Thanks.'

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. 'Morphine: the original happy drug,' he commented with a smirk. 'You really ought to get some sleep now you're more comfortable,' he advised, redressing Alice's shoulder and helping her get her arm back into the sleeve, and replacing the sling.

'I don't really feel sleepy, just groggy,' Alice protested. 'I'll sit on one of those sofas in the Hub, and I promise I won't do anything energetic – I don't want to sleep in the day, though, it's really not that bad, and I don't want to miss everything.'

The Doctor seemed to relent. 'OK. No sleep, but no action either. Jack and I are heading out this morning to try and locate the remaining missing people, but you are absolutely not coming with us.' His eyes were dark and serious, so Alice nodded meekly and sincerely, recognising that he was probably right. She slid off the bed, wobbling only slightly, and together they made their way back out to the Hub.

...

In the end, Alice wasn't left alone in the Hub; Gwen and Jack had gone ahead to start visiting a list of locations that they had identified as being likely haunts of the missing people, and the Doctor was in the TARDIS, searching for likely areas of temporal distortion, and poised to follow Jack and Gwen if the readings they were transmitting to him indicated that they had found someone. Jack had asked Ianto to stay behind, ostensibly to monitor the rift and deal with anything else that came up in the mean time.

Nothing happened for a long time. Alice talked to Ianto for a while, but he got embroiled in a long telephone conversation with someone from the Chief Constable's office and compared to the non-stop action of the last two days, merely sitting on a sofa started making Alice restless and bored, even though she was still tired and a little achey. She and knew that she would end up falling asleep on the sofa if she didn't get out and have some fresh air.

A quick search of the nearest work station yielded a notepad and a biro that said 'U.N.I.T.' on it. She looked at the logo, wondering idly if it was some branch of the RAF, and whether that's where Captain Jack had gained his rank. She couldn't quite remember whether Captain was even an Air Force rank.

She wrote a brief note, explaining that she was going to get some fresh air, and then as an afterthought, added Jenny's address. She waved it at Ianto as he spoke soothingly to whoever in the Police he was trying to placate, and then pointed at the lift platform. Ianto nodded, and Alice hopped onto the platform just as it started to ascend.

It was sunny outside, but as always, there was a stiff breeze sweeping in from the Bay. Alice relished the fresh air on her skin and in her lungs, and set off to walk to Jenny's. It was usually about ten minutes' walk, but Alice found that she tired easily, and had to stop and rest on a bench at one point.

As she sat, she let her eyes close and her mind drift. Around her, the strands and interweaving patterns of time came into sharper focus, and she began to enjoy their ebb and flow. Remembering what she'd learned from the Gallifreyan children's game, she focused on a young man opposite who was standing still while he wrote a text. She allowed her time sense to delve into the shifting patterns around him, seeing his past as it meandered along, picking its course seemingly at random from all the possibilities before dissolving into a million smaller strands at the constantly evolving present moment.

She marvelled at the beauty of a life with so much more potential than the man would probably ever tap into. And she tried in vain not to see the possible futures which seemed to end abruptly. Opening her eyes, and blinking at the sunlight, Alice willed herself not to look at the man too closely, so that she wouldn't remember his face, or recognise him again – she realised that she didn't want to know too much about anyone's future. No wonder that the Time Lords taught their children to read timelines using wooden beads instead of people.

Suppressing a shiver, Alice got to her feet and continued on her way, perhaps a little faster.

The bell rang as Alice pushed open the door to the florist shop, and Jenny looked up from behind the counter, her expression turning instantly from polite welcome to delight and relief.

'Alice!' she exclaimed, putting down the bunch of roses she was wrapping. 'What on earth happened to you? I was so worried when you didn't come back, and then some Police woman rang and said you'd had an accident.'

'I'm really sorry, Jenny. I was a bit out of it for a while, and my phone got broken too. I didn't have any ID on me, and the hospital didn't know who to call anyway.' Alice felt bad about lying to her friend, but it was much easier than the truth. If she had tried to tell Jenny that she'd been befriended by an alien, rescued someone from a rift in time and space, and then been shot, Jenny might well have called in the men in white coats.

'What I don't understand is why you look so well – even with your arm and hand all bandaged up, you look a million times better than you did three days ago!' Jenny commented.

'Yeah, the headaches are all gone,' Alice confirmed, smiling. 'Actually, they sorted that out at the same time as my shoulder. And actually,' she added, realising that this might be the best opportunity, 'I met someone – the Doctor – he sorted my shoulder and hand out, and my head, for that matter. And, well, he was only visiting Cardiff on his travels, and I sort of said I'd go travelling with him for a bit.'

Even as she spoke, Alice could imagine what must be going through Jenny's mind.

'That's brilliant, about the headaches being sorted out. But going travelling with this doctor seems a bit sudden,' Jenny commented, carefully. 'You really only met him two days ago, when you had your accident?'

'It's just something I want to do,' Alice said, eventually. 'I know it sounds mad, but I think I need to get away for a while, get my head straight about breaking up with Ed, and think about what I want to do with my life. This Doctor and I, we're not an item or anything, it's just a chance to get away and see a bit more of the world. Find out who I am these days.'

'You know, that does almost make sense,' Jenny nodded. 'So have you come to collect your stuff?'

'There's not much of it, really,' Alice offered. 'But I ought to, yes.'

'Then do me a favour. Just take what you actually need for this trip, and leave the rest here. And keep the spare key, too. I want you to know that you can always come back here if things don't work out with this doctor bloke.'

'Thanks. Really, thank you,' Alice said, warmly. 'You've been such a good friend these last few months, and I've not exactly been at my best. Hopefully when I next come back I'll have sorted myself out and be better company.'

'Course. I'll let you get packed, but make sure you say goodbye before you go, and if you get a new phone, let me have the number?'

'Will do.'

Ten minutes later, Alice had packed a holdall with what she thought would probably be the most useful and practical clothes, a bag of toiletries and some other bits and bobs.

'Do you feel up to doing one last delivery?' Jenny asked, after they'd said their goodbyes.

Alice raised her eyebrows in an unspoken question.

'I've had another order for a bouquet for that woman in Bute Street – did you hear that they found her daughter in the end? Apparently she'd had her drink spiked with something nasty, had an allergic reaction, and ended up losing a week's worth of memory. Sounds awful, but apparently no other harm done.'

'Blimey, is that what they say happened?' wondered Alice, again thinking that the fabricated lie was much easier to swallow than the truth.

'I was going to pop round anyway to see how Brenda was doing,' Alice offered, 'so I'd be happy to take the bouquet. Is this it?' She reached out to the roses, which were now mixed with some greenery and tied with a ribbon.

'Thanks,' nodded Jenny. 'Be careful, won't you? And stay in touch,' she called as Alice exited the shop.

...

The hour that Alice spent with Brenda and Megan felt very awkward. Alice had been looking forward to seeing again the older woman whom she had started to consider as a friend. But it was very odd meeting Megan properly for the first time. She really did look like a younger version of Alice, and it felt very odd to be offering Megan sympathy for a series of events which had never happened. The empathy that she'd felt for Brenda before was still there, but it seemed distant now – the deception was necessary, but there was a cost to it. It was strange, too, having to repeat her own feeble lie about her injuries, and why she'd not been answering her phone. Alice felt bad about breathing a sigh of relief as the front door closed behind her and she was able to start walking back to the Hub.

At least she would be able to report back to the Captain that the fake memories were holding nicely.


	18. Chapter 18

Alice stood in the Plass for a minute, not sure what to do next. She hadn't thought about how she was going to get back into the Hub once she'd left. She stared at the kerbstone which she knew was the invisible lift, trying to discern if any of the odd temporal overlay she could perceive would tell her how to operate it, but there was nothing helpful. In the end, she sat down on it, thinking that if Ianto were there, he would eventually see her on the CCTV that she'd seen down in the Hub.

Less than a minute later, she had jumped up again, feeling silly, as the stone began to descend.

'Thanks!' she called to Ianto, once she was far enough underground for gap above her to have sealed.

'Don't mention it,' the Welshman replied. 'There's nobody on the other entrance either at the moment, so either way I'd have had to let you in.'

Alice stepped off the platform, and went to put her holdall down on the sofa before making her way to Ianto's workstation.

'How are they doing?' she asked, trying to work out what Ianto's monitor was showing. 'Have they found anyone yet?'

'I'm tracking their progress using the CCTV. There are a few blind spots, but fortunately they're just on the edge of Sevenoaks park, and that's well covered. They've found something they think is a signal that relates to the homeless man, so the Doctor's meeting them there. That's why it took me a while to notice you upstairs and let you in.'

As if on cue, a fuzzy image of Jack and Gwen appeared on the right hand side of the monitor, and Alice realised that the distinctive blue shape of the Doctor's TARDIS was already in the background, half hidden in some trees.

Alice watched as Jack looked like he was glancing at his watch, but Alice realised that he was using the Doctor's device to try and pinpoint the target area. Beside him, Gwen was turning slowly around, unable to see what it was they were looking for – she had a mobile phone held to her ear, presumably in contact with the Doctor.

'What will they do now?' Alice whispered.

'If all goes according to plan, then they should be able to use the TARDIS to stabilise the pocket of phased time. Jack should then be able to retrieve whoever's stuck in there, and the breach should seal itself automatically.'

'Sounds simple,' Alice commented. 'Why do I think that it's unlikely to go according to plan?'

'Maybe because they're using essentially the same plan that they were going to use the day you pulled Megan out of the rift, and it didn't go so well then?' suggested Ianto.

As they watched, the two grainy figures on the screen seemed to turn and focus on a single point – though through the CCTV image Alice was frustratingly unable to see what it was they had picked up. At the same moment, the light on the top of the TARDIS started to pulse, and Jack took three steps forward, stretching out his right arm even as he turned his head away. A moment later, Jack stepped forward again, and his left arm joined his right as he leaned forward. A moment after that, he staggered forward, and Gwen launched herself at him, but by the time she'd taken the three steps, Jack had vanished, and her hands closed on empty air.

Alice gasped, and Ianto's knuckles went white as he gripped the side of the workstation. On the screen, Gwen was turning on the spot and looking wildly around, but there was nothing to see. In the background Alice could just make out the running figure of the Doctor. He pulled up next to Gwen, and held his right hand up – the resolution was too poor to show it, but he was obviously using the sonic screwdriver to try and take a reading.

Ianto touched his earpiece, and Gwen's voice sounded over the speaker.

'The breach has closed, but Jack's inside it. We don't know where he is,' she reported, sounding panicked. 'The Doctor can't find any trace of what we were tracking, he says that in all likelihood it's dumped both Jack and the homeless man somewhere else – and probably in a completely different time period.'

'I'll phone Jack's number,' Ianto offered. 'If it dumped them in the past, then he'll have been lying low until now, so as not to double up.'

But there was no answer from Jack's phone. Three minutes later the TARDIS was back in the Hub, and the Doctor and Gwen were reviewing what had happened. The Doctor was sitting forward on the sofa, his hands covering his face, and elbows resting on his knees, while Gwen paced distractedly.

'We don't know when Jack's ended up, but we can't wait for him,' Gwen concluded. 'We still have two more people to find, and the Doctor's right, the longer we leave it, the more difficult it might become to trace them and then retrieve them.'

'But we can't even be sure what's causing the fluctuations in phasing,' the Doctor explained. 'My fear is that it's another one of those creatures that attacked you, Alice, and the last thing we need is for one of those to escape into real time. Jack and I dealt with one a while back, and it wasn't pretty.' He had a distant look in his eyes, and Alice guessed that 'not pretty' was probably something of an understatement.

'So, we keep tracking the remaining two people and let Jack make his own way home?' Ianto asked, accusation in his voice.

The Doctor had no reply to that – Alice guessed that even if he did drop everything to search the Captain, there was no guarantee that he'd be able to find him – the rift could have dropped him anywhere, and she didn't like to think about the possibility that he'd not been expelled at all, and was still stuck there, phased, or worse.

As it turned out, they didn't have long to wait. When Ianto's phone rang a moment later his face relaxed in obvious relief. Ending the call, he quickly explained that Jack had been found, and that the Police had sensibly called the emergency number on Jack's ID. Ianto practically ran through the Hub to pick up the SUV, and fifteen minutes later, he and the Doctor between then were carrying Jack's body through the cogwheel door.

Alice pulled her holdall off the sofa so they could lay him down. He was a mess. There were ugly burn marks all across his neck and face and hands, and there was something even more wrong about him than usual to Alice's time sense – but she didn't want to believe what her instincts were telling her.

'Wait a minute,' she gasped in realisation, 'he's dead! I thought he couldn't die?'

'Oh, he dies all the time,' explained the Doctor, almost casually. 'He just doesn't stay dead for long. Brace yourself, when he resurrects the effect can be a bit nauseating.'

Alice found herself lost for words, partly because she found the Doctor's attitude difficult to understand, and partly because he was right, she did suddenly feel very odd, and took an involuntary step back. On the sofa, the wounds on Jack's body were disappearing, and Alice's stomach lurched unpleasantly as Jack himself sat upright with a gasp, and Ianto immediately ran to his side.

'You'll get used to it,' the Doctor said, softly into Alice's ear. At some point he had come to stand next to her, and now put a steadying arm around her shoulders. She nodded, not trusting herself to speak yet, although the nausea was quickly fading as Jack himself seemed to come to full recovery.

'That was decidedly unpleasant,' Jack commented, standing up from the sofa and stretching.

'What happened?' Gwen asked, concern in her voice.

'The creature – or one just like it – was there in the rift,' Jack explained, grimly. It had the homeless man in its grasp, but that thing has too many damned tentacles.' He rubbed his neck as if it still ached, although the marks were gone. 'I guess I didn't taste good, as it must have spat me out after I died. How long was I gone?'

'Minutes,' the Doctor replied, with a brief shake of his head. 'What about the homeless man?'

Jack shook his head, tight-lipped. 'I can't be sure, but it's quite possible that his timeline's already set. You remember the last incident we had with one of these creatures? A year ago in this timeline? I think that was him.'

The Doctor blew out a breath, and closed his eyes. Alice could see that they had shared in some awful experience, and that whatever it was involved the time when the homeless man had finally been ejected from the rift, a year in the past. She desperately wanted to get her head around the implications of that, but it sounded as if it was best not to ask about this particular incident.

'Well, there's nothing we can do for him in that case,' the Time Lord said, resigned. 'The task now is to make sure that we take care of the other two missing people so that we don't get a repeat of what happened there.'

With that, Ianto produced drinks from somewhere and they all sat down to plan the next step. Alice could only hope that someone would come up with a safer plan – but it didn't look good.


	19. Chapter 19

It was late afternoon by the time they went out again in search of Susan and Fran, the remaining two missing people. The Doctor and Jack had reluctantly agreed that Alice should come with them, if only so that there was more than one person who could see the anomalies when they finally managed to locate them.

Fran was a secretary in the University, and lived in a first floor flat in Fairoak Road, in nearby Cathays. Gwen and Ianto's earlier research had yielded a list of likely locations, so Jack and Gwen and Alice set off up Lloyd George Avenue in the SUV, aiming to rendezvous with the Doctor in the TARDIS behind the old copper-spired chapel in Cathays cemetery. They had agreed that of the likely locations to start searching for Fran, the cemetery was the most likely – both her parents were buried there, and she was in the habit of putting fresh flowers on the grave every Saturday, and would usually take a walk through one of the long, winding paths. She'd been gone long enough now that she'd missed a week.

Jack, Gwen and Alice piled out of the SUV. The earpiece felt strange to Alice – but she was glad to be able to keep in touch with the others as they split up to search the vast area of grassland and graves.

Jack and Gwen took the perimeters, while Alice closed her eyes, and reached out with her time sense, desperate to pick out among all the fluctuating background activity anything that felt similar to what she'd experienced when they had found Megan. There were sensations here in the cemetery that almost overwhelmed her. So little future, but so very much past, the intertwining histories of generations of local people all concentrated into one place.

Her breath caught suddenly. There it was. Definitely something that stuck out against the backdrop of past memories, and something very different from the distinctive beauty of the TARDIS, and the disturbingly still point that was Captain Jack. Automatically, Alice moved towards what she'd felt, remembering belatedly to touch the earpiece and call the others towards the location she'd pinpointed.

Walking more quickly, Alice began to be able to make out what the Doctor had called the ripple in the curtain – just enough of a surface disturbance to hint at the turmoil that Alice knew was going on behind it.

Softly running footsteps behind her signalled Gwen's arrival, and Jack joined them just a moment later.

'There,' Alice whispered. 'By the tree at the edge of this section. I'm sure this is it. This is her.'

Jack directed the device on his wrist towards her, and checked: 'Doc, are you getting this?'

'Yep,' came the reply through their earpieces. 'The readings are modulating, but nowhere near as badly as before. I don't want to jinx us, but this should be easier. Be careful, Jack.'

The Captain said nothing, but just as he had done when Alice had watched him on the grainy CCTV image, he started to walk forward, right arm outstretched.

'I'm sensitive enough to this kind of thing to know it when I touch it,' Jack explained, grimacing in distaste, as his fingers reached closer. 'The theory is that I can perceive it just well enough that when I'm right there on top of it, I'll be able to locate her and pull her out.'

'But you can't even see it,' Alice objected.

'I'm happier not seeing it, believe me,' Jack replied, his voice strained. 'Doc, you ready?'

The Doctor answered in the affirmative, and Jack was there, right up against the distortion. Alice felt sick seeing him so close, every fibre of her being wanting to drag him away from it, as far away from it as possible. Gwen seemed to sense this, and put a restraining hand on Alice's elbow.

'Wait,' she said, softly.

It all happened very quickly after that. Jack let out an inhuman howl of what sounded horribly like pain, and flickered oddly, blurring even to Gwen's sight. She and Alice started forward uncertainly, but by the time they got there, they were just in time to see Jack flicker back into plain sight, this time with his arms wrapped protectively around the body of a young woman.

Jack staggered, and Gwen and Alice caught the woman as she fell from his slack arms. He stumbled away and fell to his knees and elbows, retching into the grass.

The woman herself was cold to the touch, but when Gwen placed her fingers to the side of her neck, she looked up at Alice and let out a breath in relief.

'Captain, what's your status?' came the Doctor's voice through the comm.

Gwen replied on Jack's behalf. 'The target is alive, repeat, alive, but she needs medical attention. Jack's alive, but not doing too well either. Have you stabilised the breach?'

'It's already sealed itself. I'm on my way.'

Gwen asked Alice to make Fran comfortable while she herself checked on Jack, who was still coughing and groaning a few feet away.

Alice looked down at the young woman. She was instantly recognisable from the missing persons photograph they had found, but the time she had spent phased in the rift had clearly taken its toll. She was pretty much unconscious, though breathing evenly, but her skin was unnaturally pale, and her lips were dry and cracked. Alice dimly remembered the Doctor saying that Megan had been dehydrated, and hoped that this was the case for Fran, rather than anything worse. Wincing at her aching shoulder, Alice managed to take off her own jacket to wrap around Fran's shoulders, rolling her into the recovery position just as the familiar sound of the TARDIS' engines began.

The Doctor picked Fran up easily and carried her into the TARDIS, while Gwen and Alice between them helped Jack to stand and walked him through the doors into the console room.

'I just need to sit down for a bit,' he mumbled. 'Here's fine. The TARDIS will look after me, won't you, old girl?'

Alice was sure that the background hum and the temperature increased for a moment, and they gently let Jack slouch in the jump seat.

'You go on, help the Doctor. I'll come and join you in a bit,' he told them, blearily, and with a doubtful backward glance, they left him there and set about locating the medbay.

The Doctor had already set up a drip stand, and was in the process of inserting a canola in the back of Fran Morgan's hand.

'Her veins had started to collapse,' the Doctor explained. 'I couldn't get a line in her arm. I don't know how long in her personal timeline she'd been in there, I can find that out later, but it looks as if we got to her just in time.'

When he looked as if he'd finished, Alice asked, 'Have you got anything you can give Jack? He seemed in a bad way.'

'He would be,' was the short reply, then the Doctor seemed to soften slightly. 'There's nothing he can take – the unpleasantness will wear off of its own accord, but I might be able to speed it up a bit. Gwen, can you stay here and watch her?'

Alice followed the Doctor out of the medbay and back to the console room. Jack was still sitting in the jump seat, but now leaning forward with his head in his hands. Alice could see even from across the room that he was sweating and shaking.

'Jack,' the Doctor said, softly, leaning with hands in pockets against the central console.

Jack looked tiredly up at him, and tried, unsuccessfully, to raise a smile.

'Hold still, let me help,' the Doctor offered, and Jack simply closed his eyes as the Time Lord took his hands from his pockets and placed his fingers on each of the other man's temples. The Doctor shuddered slightly, and Alice reached out with her time sense, wanting to know what the Doctor was doing, but the TARDIS was too complicated a background for her to see any detail.

After a long moment, the Doctor broke contact, and stepped back unsteadily, righting himself quickly and giving his head a little shake. Jack looked up a few seconds later, blinking.

'Thanks,' he said simply.

'Don't mention it,' the Doctor replied. 'But don't make a habit of it, either,' he grimaced. Whatever the Doctor had done, Alice could see that it had clearly taken some effort. Another thing to store away and ask about later.

'Right!' said the Doctor, seeming suddenly to regain his energy, and rubbing his hands together. 'Next one, Allons-y!'


	20. Chapter 20

It was just after 6pm, and the intelligence that Ianto and Gwen had gathered indicated that Susan, their remaining missing person, was most likely to be somewhere in Splott. The small house she shared with her twenty-year old son was in Janet Street, and she worked in a small manufacturing plant in the Splott Industrial estate. She had lived in the area all her life, and her ex-husband had been employed in the steelworks.

'Now we've seen several of these temporal distortions, I should be able to persuade the TARDIS to scan for anything similar,' the Doctor explained, as they sat together in the boardroom, having debriefed on what had gone right and what had gone wrong during the rescue of Fran Morgan, who was now safely installed in the Torchwood medical facility. 'It's tricky, the rift complicates things, as there's already so much fluctuation in the background, but it's worth a try.'

'So if we can pinpoint a location accurately, should we be able to close the breach and retrieve our final target remotely?' Jack asked.

'Or will one of us still need to be there on the ground to pull her out?' Gwen wondered.

The Doctor shook his head. 'We can't do it remotely. The TARDIS will monitor the fluctuations and try and stabilise the phasing, but some things just have to be done personally. And I think it's probably my turn,' he finished, grimly. 'Jack, are you OK to swap places this time round?'

Jack wasn't happy about the idea of the Doctor being the one to take the biggest risk. In the end Alice confronted him. 'Just because you don't stay dead, that doesn't mean that your death is less important, Jack,' she offered. 'I saw what it did to you earlier this afternoon, and I know what it felt like when I got stuck in there. None of us is taking this lightly.'

In the end they agreed that Ianto and Gwen would stay behind – one of them needed to keep an eye on Fran, and the other would need to keep an eye on the rift, as well as keep in contact with the team in the TARDIS. Alice persuaded the Doctor and Jack that she was OK to go with them, but she wasn't optimistic about being allowed out of the TARDIS once everything kicked off. There was something rather nice about having suddenly gained two powerful and protective older brother figures, but it took some getting used to.

A few minutes later, they were in the TARDIS, and Alice craned her neck to try and see the main monitor, but the Doctor and the Captain were both a good head taller than her. When she did manage to glimpse it, there seemed to be a beautiful but random set of shapes swirling on the screen. But the Doctor was staring at them intently, leaning forward with his hands on the console. His lips were slightly parted, and his tongue just touching the back of his top teeth – she had noticed earlier that this was something he often did when he was thinking. The Captain was standing with hands on hips, also focusing on the screen, but Alice couldn't tell whether he was able to understand the symbols, or whether he was simply waiting for the Doctor to tell them what was happening.

'There,' the Doctor suddenly said, and straightened, grabbing the monitor screen in one hand and using the other to type something on what looked awfully like an old fashioned typewriter, set into the console. He let go of the screen, and almost danced around the console as he flicked switches and finally pulled a lever that made the central column rise and fall in its light blue glow, and the engines began their characteristic wheezing groan.

There was a bump which had Alice gripping the nearest coral strut, and the noise died down as the Doctor made his way quickly to the doors. Alice followed him, and was slightly surprised that he didn't try to stop her.

'Do stay back this time,' was his only comment, as they both saw quite clearly what it was they had come to look for. They had materialised in Janet Street itself, and the temporal distortion was focused on Susan Mason's own front doorstep.

'Jack, what are you getting?' he spoke softly.

Jack's voice came through clearly on the earpieces: 'Same as before. Stable in space, but lots of fluctuation in time. Be careful, I kinda like how you look in this body.'

The Doctor made a small noise that could almost have been a laugh, and began to step forward. Alice stayed behind him, as instructed. Just as in Megan's garden back on Bute street two days before, the distortion before them was unsettling, menacing, even. It shouldn't be there. She shuddered, and part of her wanted to head straight back into the comforting complexity of the TARDIS.

'I'm close enough now to reach in,' the Doctor said, quietly, crouching down and resting a hand on the flagstone. 'It's not nice. I can see why it made you sick.' Alice could see him steeling himself to lean down and forward. She could also make out, just as the Doctor probably could, what might just have been the shape of a curled up body, hidden behind the curtain of fluctuating time.

The Doctor leaned forward the last few inches, stretching out a hand, and was suddenly and violently jerked down, his yell of surprise and pain cut short as his legs flailed once and he was dragged all the way into the distortion itself. Alice couldn't prevent her own scream, and in panic, she jabbed at the comm device in her ear.

'Jack, get out here, it's got the Doctor!' she gasped.

Through the earpiece Alice dimly heard an explosion, and what sounded like an alarm. But there was no reply from the Captain. There would be no help from there, it seemed.

With one backward glance at the solid blue box across the road, Alice turned back to the temporal distortion and summoning all her reckless tendencies that the Doctor was planning to educate out of her, she bent down and focused on the shimmering, undulating temporal strands before her, letting herself fall.

It was worse than before. It was chaos. And she was alone. Alice remembered belatedly how Megan had seemed to phase in and out of existence, that time was unstable even within the distortion, as well as relative to the normal world. Swallowing back nausea, and willing herself to concentrate, Alice closed her eyes and reached out with her time sense for the distinctive, wonderful patterns and colours that she knew she would instantly recognise as the Time Lord's own temporal imprint.

But even breathing was a struggle, as if she was under water again, pulled about, buffeted, and at the mercy of the currents of time as they swirled around her. But there was just a glimpse of something at the edge of her perception. Something she recognised, and had to find again. She could feel her fists clenching with the effort, but it was almost as if she could slow the fluctuating strands just a fraction around that brief glimpse of what she knew must be the Doctor. Alice was on her knees, but with an almighty effort she reached out and felt her hand make contact with something, and as she touched it, it became more solid. Opening her eyes a crack confirmed that she had managed to reach the Doctor, and had a handful of his coat gripped in her bandaged hand.

But the good news ended there. Alice hadn't seen what had pulled the Doctor into the distortion, but it was clear now that another of the creatures – or perhaps the same one – had managed to reach out one of its tendrils to wrap around the Doctor's throat, and was slowly squeezing the life out of him. His eyes were closed, his face blotchy and his hands were weakly trying to prize the creature's grip loose.

Alice added her own efforts, but was hampered by the sling. She tore it off, choking back a sob as pain ripped through her shoulder. She dug her fingers around the oozing tentacle, but it was too strong; it burned her skin, but all she was aware of was the horrible gasping choking noise that the Doctor was making as he struggled to breathe. At the same time, more of the tentacles were whipping around his head, and towards Alice, too – she flinched away from them, while never leaving the Doctor's side.

'I don't know what to do!' she cried in desperation, almost shaking the Time Lord as his own struggles began to weaken. As she did so, a glint of silver caught her eye: the sonic screwdriver, half-fallen from the Doctor's top pocket. She grabbed it in one burned hand, almost oblivious to the pain, and as she held it up, she just made out the Doctor mouthing something. It looked like 'three – two – eight'.

Not knowing what else to do, she turned the device over, and found a tiny touch-pad. On a hunch, she slid a bloody fingertip along it until the number the Doctor had gasped out was displayed.

She glanced back at him, but he had all but lost consciousness. Not knowing what else to do, she aimed the sonic at the tentacle, a few inches from the Doctor's neck, and thumbed the switch.

The familiar whine echoed oddly and pulsed in the distorted time, but to Alice's relief, with a noise like fingernails on a blackboard, the tentacle relaxed its grip on the Doctor long enough for her to free him. But he remained unresponsive as she tried to heave his body further away from the creature. His neck was horribly burned from the tentacle's corrosive, oozing coating, and his breathing was shallow and laboured. There were several burst blood vessels in his face, from the pressure. Alice was truly panicking now. She had the sonic, and it had been the sonic that had saved her before. But then, the Doctor had been out the outside, in normal time and space; this time he was just as trapped as she was, and she didn't even know what setting to try and use, even if the same effect was possible from within the distortion itself.

And her hands were in agony. She choked back another sob, and buried her face just for a moment in the folds of the Doctor's coat. It was then that she felt the hand on the back of her head. She looked up, and the Doctor's bloodshot eyes had opened just a crack. Grimacing with the pain, he mouthed another number: 'twenty-seven'.

Quickly, and painfully, Alice changed the setting, and with one last glance at the Doctor, activated the sonic with her right hand, while reaching round with her left to cradle the Doctor's shoulders. She didn't dare risk them getting separated again.

The sound was deafening, drilling through Alice's head, and everything around her seemed to shudder and jerk uncontrollably. It grew worse and worse, and she clung desperately to the Doctor's still body, investing in that solid, real presence as everything else tumbled and crashed to nothing.

There was someone screaming, and it was only when everything else had gone quiet that Alice realised that it was her. She took a shuddering breath, and found her throat was raw. But when she opened her eyes, the terraced houses of Janet Street were back, and she found that she was on the doorstep, cradling the injured Time Lord in her arms. She tried to lay him down, but her limbs didn't seem to be working, and she found she couldn't unclench her fists from his coat. When she tried, she yelled again, this time, in agony, and remembered the burning pain of the creature's tentacle.

'Doctor,' she croaked, willing him to open his eyes again, and make everything alright. But there was nothing save the faintest rattle of breath.

There was a sudden noise behind Alice, then running footsteps, and Jack's voice broke through her state of shock.

'Alice! What happened?' He was at her side in an instant, smelling of smoke and ozone, and straight away felt for the Doctor's radial pulse – he couldn't touch the injuries on the Time Lord's neck.

'Only one heart beating,' he muttered. 'I've got to get him to the TARDIS medbay. Can you walk on your own?' he asked Alice, gently but firmly prising her fingers free of the coat. The pain and the sight of her own bloody hand-prints on the fabric was enough to make Alice swallow back bile.

She gave a shaky nod, not trusting herself to speak, and staggered upright, holding her burned hands in front of her. The fingers were bending like claws as the skin tightened and dried in the air. It was all Alice could do to walk and breathe.

The next half hour passed in a blur. Jack had given Alice a double shot of morphine and some antibiotics, and made her lie down on one bed, while he treated the Doctor on the other. Alice's eyes kept going out of focus, and she felt sick and dizzy. The morphine helped keep the pain at a distance, but that was all.

The Doctor was undoubtedly in much worse shape than she was, however. He hadn't yet regained consciousness. Jack was constantly talking to him, using a calm, rhythmic tone that Alice found reassuring, though it was probably just as practiced as the nonchalant charm he usually used.

'Is this one of your healing comas, Doc?' he asked, finally. 'Because if it is, are you going to be happier in the zero room?' There was no response, and Jack sighed, peeling off the gloves he'd been wearing to smear ointment on the Doctor's wounds. He scrubbed at his face with his hands, then got up and stretched.

Alice blinked blearily at him as he dragged the stool over to her bed, then went back for the ointment.

'How're you doing?' he asked, tiredly, pulling on a fresh pair of gloves. 'I'm going to have a look at your hands. I can't give you any more morphine, but if you need any extra local anaesthetic, let me know, OK?'

Alice nodded. Everything felt far away, as if she was drifting. She heard herself moan as Jack took her hands in his and slowly straightened the fingers, rubbing the ointment as gently as he could into all the cracks and blisters until both her hands were coated in the sticky healing balm. The bandage from the previous burn had protected that hand a little, but even in her morphine-induced state of reduced awareness, Alice could tell that both her hands would be out of action for a while.

She must have dozed for a moment, because the Captain had to shake her awake to give her a drink. He'd found a cup with a straw, so that she could drink it lying down. It was fruity and sugary, and it helped. A little. At any rate, it gave her the strength to turn her head and look at the Doctor.

'He'll be OK, he always is,' Jack answered her unspoken question, but to Alice's ears he sounded like he was trying to convince himself.


	21. Chapter 21

Alice must have drifted off again, because the next thing she was aware of clearly was the sound of the TARDIS' engines – they had left Janet Street behind, but glancing around the medbay, Alice could see no sign of Susan Mason, the woman they'd gone there to find. She closed her eyes, swallowing back emotion.

Alice tried to get up, but she couldn't use her hands, and when she tried to roll sideways to sit up, she couldn't stop a shout of pain – even with the morphine still in her system, her shoulder felt like someone was twisting a knife in it. It was almost as bad as when the wound was fresh. Panting, she flopped back down and breathed through the pain until it settled to a manageable level. She wouldn't be trying that again in a hurry.

Alice could see out of the corner of her eye the earpiece that she had been wearing – Jack had removed it and put it on the counter several feet away, and there was no way she would be able to reach it from the bed to call Jack and find out what was happening.

Alice twisted just enough to be able to see across to the Doctor. He was unmoving, but to Alice's eyes he looked a little better, more relaxed, perhaps no longer unconscious, but sleeping.

'Doctor,' she whispered, reluctant to wake him, but suddenly feeling an overwhelming need to reassurance that he was indeed recovering.

His eyelids flickered for a moment, and he made a sound halfway between a gasp and a sigh. Alice belatedly realised that with the injuries to his neck he probably wouldn't be able to speak.

'Sorry. You can go back to sleep. I just wanted to make sure you were alive,' she said, with some relief. She turned her head back to look straight ahead, as the strain of looking sideways was pulling at her shoulder, which seemed to be aching more and more, though her hands, coated in the ointment, weren't feeling too bad. Looking at them, she realised that the ointment had dried to a sort of rubbery coating, as they were no longer sticky. She also realised that there must be some anaesthetic in the ointment, because they appeared a lot worse than they felt. She hoped it wouldn't start wearing off any time soon.

'I'm awake,' the Doctor managed, his voice cracking. 'You alright?'

'Yeah,' Alice lied. 'Do you know where we are? I heard the TARDIS engines, but Jack hasn't come back.'

'He'll have used the emergency return programme, taken us back to the Hub,' the Doctor offered. 'We didn't find her, did we?' he asked, after a pause.

'No. I'm sorry.'

'Not your fault. Still a chance she'll be found. Like Jack.'

'But Jack was dead.'

'Yeah.' The Doctor and Alice lapsed into silence.

Finally, the Doctor couldn't lie still any longer, and with some effort and a grunt of pain, managed to roll sideways and get himself off the bed. He staggered, and found his balance, bracing his forearms against the side of the bed and keeping his head down while he waited for the inevitable wave or dizziness to pass. He then turned and made his way carefully over to where Alice was lying.

'You lied. You're not OK,' he stated, still in a hoarse whisper.

'I'm better than you,' Alice retorted. 'I'd be up and about if my shoulder didn't hurt so much.'

'You'll have torn all the muscle again. I can help with that,' he offered, but before he could reach for any of the medical equipment, the medbay door burst open, and the look on the Doctor's face was almost comical as he realised he'd been been caught out of bed.

'Doctor, what are you doing?' Jack demanded. 'How are you even awake?'

'Oh, you know me,' the Time Lord croaked. 'Take more than a poisonous rift dwelling monster to keep me down for long.' But he did at least sit.

'Actually, Jack, you might want to look at Alice's shoulder. I think she re-opened the wound. It'll need the dermal regenerator again,' he suggested, nodding towards the device which was still out on the counter from the day before.

'Why didn't you say?' Jack asked, unzipping Alice's top just enough to be able to see clearly that the dressing on the gunshot wound was soaked in blood again. He peeled it off, and dumped it in the nearest waste vaporiser, grabbing the dermal regenerator and adjusting the settings before starting to pass it over the bloody mess. Alice bit her lip. The process wasn't any more painful, exactly, but it was an unpleasant feeling.

'This time, you really will have to wear the sling for a few days,' the Doctor reminded her in his hoarse whisper. 'Needs time to heal. Not that I'm ungrateful, though.' He looked down, and Alice wondered whether she would escape a lecture about recklessness this time, since the Doctor had been the main beneficiary.

When Jack had finished, he wiped away the dried blood, and covered it with another dressing, taping it in place.

'Do you feel up to coming into the Hub?' he asked them both. 'We need to debrief, but we can do it here if you prefer.'

The Doctor and Alice glanced at each other, and the Doctor answered for both of them. 'We'll come in. Any chance of tea?'

'Don't tell me – the tannins and free radicals will have you back to normal in minutes?'

'They'll help,' the Doctor admitted, with a half smile.

Jack helped Alice sit up, and then stand. They made a slow and unsteady procession through the TARDIS, and Alice was glad to sit down again when they got to the boardroom.

...

The debrief was a sober affair. Ianto had broken into the Jaffa cakes, but although the Doctor looked longingly at them, his throat was still too bruised to let him swallow anything other than the tea. Alice had one, but it didn't feel right to enjoy it, and in any case, the gel coating her hands smelt odd, and she still felt queasy from the morphine.

In short, the attempt to rescue Susan Mason had been a failure. It was impossible to know if she was even still alive, and trapped in the rift, or if by now she had already been expelled at some other location or would be at some point in the future. The Doctor would be able to search, but it was looking less and less likely that she would be found alive. Alice, like the others, found that the knowledge that they had saved two people wasn't enough to make up for the fact that they had failed to save two more.

They were all exhausted, but Jack, Gwen and Ianto had an emergency call-out to deal with a Weevil attack, leaving the Doctor and Alice alone in the Hub. Alice's head was full of questions, but it just didn't seem to be the right time to ask them. The Doctor seemed on edge, probably from a combination of pain, frustration, and self-reproach, since Alice could echo all three feelings. Plus, she didn't want to make him talk too much until his throat looked better. Although, from what she could make out through the gel coating, it did look like it was healing rather more quickly than her own hands were.

So they sat in silence, and eventually Alice felt herself drifting off, and decided to settle down more comfortably on the sofa. Three days before she had woken up in exactly that position, to see the Doctor sitting exactly where he was now. But everything had changed. The universe was a bigger place, and she felt years older. There was more to life now, much more, but she had also lost something, an innocence that she would never now be able to reclaim.

She had just begun to fall asleep when the telephone rang, shattering the silence. She struggled upright, and the Doctor shrugged, pointing at his neck, and then at Alice.

'I suppose I'd better answer it, then,' she offered, and eventually found a handset buried under some papers on Gwen's workstation, clumsily pressing the call button with a gel-coated finger.

'Hello?'

'Gwen?' came a male voice on the other end of the phone.

'Um. No, sorry, she's not here at the moment,' Alice replied, realising that she must sound like an idiot. 'Can I take a message for her?'

'Tell her it's Andy, and that we've got something she might be interested in. Middle aged woman, found an hour ago in the Splott industrial estate with weird burn marks – paramedics thought it was some kind of industrial accident, but nobody can identify the corrosive, it doesn't match anything that's in use on the estate. Or anything on the hospital poisons database, either. Anyway, tell her to give me a ring, will you?'

'Yeah, will do,' Alice replied, her mind already working overtime. 'Say, Andy, where is she now, and have you got an ID for her?'

'The Royal Infirmary. And no, not yet. We're working on it. She's still unconscious.'

'Thanks, Andy, I'll pass that on.'

'Cheers then, love.' The line went dead, and Alice turned to the Doctor in triumph.

'She's still alive!'

'What?'

Alice quickly relayed what the Police Officer had told her, and the Doctor seemed to come back to life himself, jumping up from the sofa and grabbing the phone handset from Alice to call Jack.

But when the call was connected, it was clear that this was a bad time – they had clearly managed to find the Weevil, but were having some problems containing it. Jack merely said 'deal with it,' and cut the connection.

The Doctor almost looked pleased. 'Alice, would you care to accompany me to the hospital?' His voice was sounding more normal now, just a little scratchy.

'Why not?' she replied. 'But we'll both need to cover this stuff up,' she went on, holding her hands up and gesturing towards the Doctor's neck. 'It's not exactly 21st century, is it?'

'No, it's not, but it's good stuff,' the Doctor protested. 'We'll go in the TARDIS and pick something up from the wardrobe room.

Ten minutes later, Alice and the Doctor exited the TARDIS, which the Time Lord had managed to materialise behind a tree in a very dark corner of the staff car park at Cardiff Royal Infirmary. The Doctor had found from somewhere a ridiculously long knitted scarf, which effectively covered all the healing gel round his neck, though he did complain that it was hot and itchy, and that he couldn't remember why it had ever been a favourite garment. There was a floppy hat, too, that strangely went well with the scarf, perhaps because they were both so eccentric. But it did cover the burn marks and gel that coated the Doctor's ears. He had also donned a pair of gloves.

Alice would have been ashamed to have been seen with him, had she not looked almost as bad, with enormous pink mittens on her hands, and her arm still in a sling. How they were going to persuade anyone in the hospital that they were official enough to discharge Susan Mason, Alice had no idea. At this rate, they would be lucky if the receptionist didn't call security. Or someone from psychiatric, for that matter.

She was proved wrong. They found the entrance to Accident and Emergency, and when the Doctor approached the desk, he fumbled for a moment in an inner pocket, drawing out a small wallet and flashed it at the woman behind the desk.

'Home office. We're here about the Jane Doe found on the Industrial Estate.'

The woman looked usefully impressed, and immediately paged the registrar who had been charged with her care.

She looked tired and harassed. Alice surprised herself by being pleased – a tired, harassed, doctor was more likely to be grateful for them taking the woman off her hands. She and the Doctor followed her.

As they walked, Alice whispered, 'why do you have Home Office ID?'

'Psychic paper. Shows exactly what I want people to see.' The Doctor passed her the wallet, and she opened it, frowning at the contents.

'But this doesn't say anything about the Home Office,' Alice objected.

'Doesn't it?' the Doctor asked. 'What does it say?'

'It says, "Wouldn't it be fun if you were telepathic too."'

'Oops, sorry. Mind wandering,' he said, with a mischievous grin.

They had followed the registrar to the cubicle at the far end of the corridor, and she pushed the curtain aside to let them in. The woman on the bed was undoubtedly Susan Mason, but, like Fran Morgan, she had obviously been in the rift for a while. The burn marks which criss-crossed her face and chest looked to have been inflicted by a flailing tendril. She had been luckier than Alice had dared hope, avoiding the sort of injuries that the Doctor and Jack had suffered.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and the registrar had gone back outside the cubicle, and the Time Lord was happily lying through his teeth. Alice could just make out a few highlights: 'a matter of national security... no risk to the general public ... no, no need for quarantine... yes, we've got a waiting ambulance...' Within minutes, the registrar had agreed to discharge the woman in their care, and Alice began to wonder whether the Doctor's powers of persuasion must be due to some kind of mind control. She couldn't believe it had been that easy.

They wheeled the woman through the staff car park, and into the TARDIS. Once she had been transferred onto one of the medbay beds, the Doctor set her up with a drip, and Alice made herself useful by taking the trolley back. They were back at the Hub within forty five minutes of Andy's phone call, Susan Mason had a drip full of saline and retcon, and the gooey ointment spread liberally across the burns. Alice and the Doctor were feeling very smug indeed when Jack, Ianto and Gwen returned at around eleven o'clock, looking exhausted and dishevelled. Though they did admit that a Weevil hunt which ended peacefully and with no injuries could be counted as a win.

Everyone was sick of pizza, so the Doctor declared it to be curry night, and when it arrived, he surprised everyone by claiming that certain chemicals in fenugreek and cumin were wonderful for healing bruising in Time Lords. Alice didn't know whether he was joking or not, but there may have been some truth in it, because he proceeded to eat all his own portion of curry and half of hers, presumably making up for the food he missed earlier.

There was quite a bit of report-writing to be done, but this was done accompanied by the healthy banter that comes when a team know each other well, and from the shared euphoria of knowing that things had gone about as well as they could have done. Susan showing up, and in relative good health, had felt like a bonus, or even perhaps a reward, to all of them.

Working at Torchwood seemed to require an endless stamina for late nights. The Doctor freely admitted that he only slept about twice a week, but even he was starting to look a little tired. In the end tiredness won over pride, and Alice crashed out shortly before one in the morning, opting to lie down where she lay and fall asleep with the buzz of conversation still going on.

...

An hour later, the Hub was quiet. Jack surveyed his kingdom, silently giving thanks that they'd got through the day almost in one piece, and especially that Alice and the Doctor looked to be recovering so well.

He looked down at Alice, sprawled on the sofa, and smiled. Earlier in the day, at Janet Street, he'd thought he might lose both of them. He'd seen on the monitor the moment when the Doctor had been pulled into the distortion, but he'd barely heard Alice's panicked cry for help, because by that time he'd been completely occupied with trying to contain the numerous small explosions all over the console as the aged time ship struggled to stabilise the distortion long enough to save her Doctor.

When Jack had finally emerged from the smoke-filled console room, his relief had turned to dismay at the sight of their injuries, and especially when the Doctor had taken so long to regain consciousness. Jack had asked him about that later, about why his respiratory bypass hadn't kicked in. The Doctor had looked at him curiously and replied that it had, but that it only bought him an extra fifteen minutes or so. He hadn't realised that in real time, only a few seconds had passed, while he had been struggling with the creature for quarter of an hour.

Jack shivered at all the worse 'what ifs'. You win some, you lose some, he thought, and we won that one. Just about.

The Doctor had hinted that he and Alice would be leaving in the morning. As she lay sleeping on the sofa, she looked small and fragile, and Jack hoped that she really was ready for life in the TARDIS. Not that he could promise her anything safer, if she chose to remain behind.


	22. Chapter 22

Alice's holdall was safely stored in what was now her bedroom on the TARDIS. She was beyond excited, but at the same time there was a sense of unreality about it all. Over the last few days she'd been through the mill emotionally and physically, and the sensible part of her knew that it would take time to adjust, while another part of her never really wanted to get used to what her life had suddenly become, but to continue to treat it like the miracle it undoubtedly was.

'Come back and see us?' Jack asked, as they stood in an awkward group around the open TARDIS doors.

'Of course we will!' Alice smiled, then looked at the Doctor for confirmation. He nodded once, with a distant look on his face. Then he suddenly stiffened, eyes widening.

'I think we already have,' he said, urgently. 'Quick, into the TARDIS, we need to go right now!'

He bundled Alice through the doors, and followed her in, clicking them shut behind him, and almost immediately the TARDIS whined and groaned into nothingness.

'Well, that was abrupt, even by the Doctor's standards,' commented Ianto dryly.

'Wait a minute, what's that on the CCTV?' Gwen pointed to the screen that monitored what was happening on the Plass immediately above the Hub. There, plain for all to see, was the TARDIS, right next to the invisible lift. The light was still pulsing; it had clearly only just materialised.

With only a glance at each other, they piled onto the platform and rose impatiently to the surface, stepping off the kerb just as the TARDIS doors burst open.

Alice bounded out – but minus the sling, and with a new haircut, a suntan and a fading black eye.

'Did you miss us?' she demanded, with a grin.


End file.
